can't stop won't stop, (whipala o KRS-1)

Urban detritus, photographs, lyrics, and artefacts from seemingly disparate histories of resistance coalesce in the work of William Cordova. His installations, sculptures, drawings and moving image works use discarded matter “not to erase, transform, and make anew but to emphasize the content(s) already existing within that used or found material.” By drawing on the symbolism which is contained by these objects, Cordova’s project is less to empty them of meaning for formal application than it is to revalue their historical and cultural content through a process of transposition, often by placing them in collision with each other. can’t stop won’t stop, (whipala o KRS-I) combines references to hip-hop and early forms of conscious rap with the Wiphala flag, traditionally square in form and a symbol of Inca heritage in Andean regions running along the western coast of South America.

As presented here, Cordova’s Wiphala is adapted in form and deviates from the regular geometrical structure which is part of the flag’s traditional description: a seven by seven formation of colored squares, whereby the color of the longest, central diagonal line represents one of four regions of the former Inca Empire in pre-Columbian America. Cordova’s flag, a collage constructed from reclaimed and recycled colored paper, is noticeably irregular by comparison, oblong rather than square, and can in this way be taken to be more loosely representative of various political movements of indigenous nations against invasion, homogenization, colonization, and other forms of oppression. 

The work’s title references KRS-One’s 1996 release, Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop. KRS-One, of the hip-hop group Boogie Down Productions, has long been politically active around campaigns against violence, founding the Stop the Violence Movement in 1987. As he combines these two cultural histories into a single work, Cordova emphasizes the radically resistant elements in both references, and by doing so points to political energies which have persistently presented themselves in the cultures and histories of African, Andean and Asian diasporas in the American continents. As friend and collaborator Leslie Hewitt describes, Cordova’s creative disarrangements “force new readings, translating back and forth the convergence [of] image, text, and material [that] capture[s] seemingly dormant battles of ownership and conquest.”