The linework of this graphic is nearing completion and inking is underway!
Now more than five years in the making, this project began in 2004 with six months of first hand, on-the ground research in Central America and Mexico. A team of ten Bees investigated and documented grassroots and community-based alternatives to the Plan Puebla Panama (PPP), now renamed Proyecto Mesoamerica.
Proyecto Mesoamerica is a ‘megadevelopment’ plan to build a web of industrial and transportation infrastructure from southern Mexico through Central America to Colombia. Like its global counterparts, Project Mesoamerica aims to colonize the land and people of this region in the name of resource extraction and "efficient" global trade routes. The title of the graphic, ‘Mesoamerica Resiste,’ reflects our efforts to illustrate and share stories of grassroots movements working to oppose top-down development through horizontal, community-based organizing.
Depicted by the Beehive as an elaborate pen and ink drawing, with over 450 distinct species of plant and animals, Mesoamerica Resiste is now in the homestretch of completion!
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The Mesoamerica Resiste! graphics campaign team includes artists, organizers and researchers. About a dozen people have contributed to the Mesoamerica Resiste! project since 2003. Currently in the studio, 2-3 illustrators are in the final stages of inking the graphic using rapidograph pens on watercolor paper (and also experimenting with quills). Once completed, the graphic will come to life as a 3x6-foot, two-sided poster to be printed in the tens of thousands. We will distribute it internationally, along with multi-lingual educational material, as a tool for organizing and education throughout the Western Hemisphere.
The Hive’s graphics campaigns are anti-copyright and self-published. Everyone who contributes to the research, design and production of the graphics is personally anonymous in that we all answer the question “who made that?” with "the Beehive Design Collective." We cross-pollinate with grassroots networks for distributing the posters and doing speaking tours, picture-lectures and workshops.
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