Paula Gaetano Adi: Guanaquerx | Creative Capital Project

Learn more about Guanaquerx, by artist Paula Gaetano Adi, Creative Capital Grantee 2023.

Guanaquerx is a robotic art project and a community-engaged technological enterprise aiming at deploying the first robot to cross the Andes Mountains in South America. The project consists of the development of an autonomous exploration rover and a multiday performance that will reenact José de San Martín’s revolutionary expedition of 1817, one of the most dramatic chapters in the 19th-century struggle for Latin American independence. Inspired by the local invention of guranaqueras—makeshift all-terrain vehicles developed by amateur car mechanics from the Andes region of San Juan, Argentina, Paula Gaetano Adi will return to her hometown to collaborate with artisans and local makers in the development of the guanaquerx robot: an unmanned, autonomous machine that will cross the Andes from Argentina to Chile, navigating peaks above 4,000 meters while gathering environmental data, sounds, images, and stories as material evidence of Andean life, cosmovision, and bio-cultural diversity. Guanaquerx is a robot seeking freedom. Poetically restaging San Martín’s epic expedition that brought the liberation of Argentina, Chile, and Perú from Spanish colonizers, Guanaquerx is a project about designing and implementing technologies otherwise. A collaborative and collective feat aimed at repairing the structured unsustainability of mainstream AI and robotics and imagining an emancipatory technological practice that defies modern/Western innovation goals of space colonization and the exploitation of natural resources. Read more: https://creative-capital.org/projects...

This video was originally presented at the 2023 Creative Capital Carnival—an artist gathering for discovering grantee projects-in-progress, meeting with industry experts, building community, and celebrating artists.

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