Somoure II

W.I.P Artistic research project in collaboration with the Institute of Robotics and Industrial Informatics from Barcelona (IRI CSIC-UPC). Project funded by a S+T+ARTS in the City program with Hacte.

You can see the first part of the project here: Somoure

Somoure is an ongoing artistic research project exploring assistive robotics through an interdisciplinary perspective. Initiated during a S+T+ARTS residency at the Barcelona Institute of Industrial Robotics (IRI CSIC-UPC), it critiques the focus on improving social acceptance of this type of robotics without addressing systemic issues like caregiving precarity and privatization.

The project’s artistic output involves creating an artistic approach to a feeding-assistive robot, incorporating critical perspectives on its design and behavior. Adopting hacker and maker philosophies, Somoure frames robotics development as a caregiving process itself.

Through collective discussions, workshops and co-design methodologies, the project brings together engineers, artists, sociologists, migrant domestic labor unions, philosophers, anti-ableist activists, senior individuals and other general public, highlighting how artistic research can transform assistive technologies to address communal needs and reframe care within broader political and social contexts.

This handmade care robot in the video is not a cold machine but an ally, shaped by my own desires for aging as a woman, single, without family. It reclaims care from submission to resistance—an act of autonomy, vitality, and queer cyberfeminist imagination (more info below).

This is a video essay created in order to document the conceptual part of the second period of the artistic research project.

Video credits
Original idea and research, direction and script by Mónica Rikić
Audiovisual art direction Andrea Carandini
Technical production streamflow
Original music by Rodolfo Venegas

Art Robot (WIP)

This robot is born from an intimate projection: how I would like to be cared for when I grow old. A woman, single, without a family, and perhaps without a home in an uncertain future. In a ‘future’ world where the silver economy apparently will be at the center, where older people will become the core of social life, I don’t imagine this robot as a cold machine that merely assists me, but as an ally that gives me back agency. I don’t just want to be cared for, I want to feel beautiful, comfortable, alive. I want to resignify care: to transform it from a practice of submission into a gesture of resistance, a claim for autonomy and vitality.

That is why I make it by hand, like tailoring a dress to fit. I know its insides because I have assembled them myself, I open and repair it, I fill it with my own ideas and desires. In this way, the robot becomes a shared body, an extension of my subjectivity rather than an external imposition. I reclaim the kitchen-workshop, the maker and hacker space, as the place where care is collectively designed, where open code and circuits are treated like recipes, like shared meals.

From a queer cyberfeminist perspective, I see this gesture as a way to dismantle the hierarchies of care: no more obligatory family, no more privatized intimacy, but networks, consensuses, and technologies that allow us to imagine new ways of living together. Creating a care robot is also about reclaiming technology itself as an act of care. The handmade robot is not a substitute for the human, but a way of narrating a possible future where care is no longer the mandate of some over others, but a free, desiring, and radically alive practice.

In the video essay above, you can see the exhibition version of the device in use accompanied with an audio of a text as a result of the second part of the research. It was exhibited at «Simbiòpolis» (Palau Robert, Barcelona) in 2025, you can also see a video below. The full installation featured the video essay and a table with bust – made by Eva Chettle – of my aged face wearing the robotic device in movement. The table also had different mobile devices showing selected cuts of the video.

There has been other versions of the robot, like the one showed at Ars Electronica 2025 during a performative version. More info coming soon 🙂

Development and Methodology

The artistic creation part of the research, closely tied to my artistic practice, was focused on handcrafting an artistic version of a feeding assistive robot that was being built at the lab. The methodology involved following the development process of the original robot, engaging in the engineers’ day-to-day work routine to understand each step of the process.

Following the maker and hacker philosophies, this ‘creation’ action by ‘handcrafting’ advocates that involving the robot user in the creation process can effectively address the concerns faced by the lab, such as roboethics, privacy, trust, explainability, comprehensibility, and social acceptance. It also rejects the idea that technological production is a privileged space reserved for specialists and engineers.

Project exhibitied at Simbiòpolis exhibition at Palau Robert in Barcelona 2025