Somoure III

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.

In this third part of the project, presented as a performance, I explore the process of making technology as a form of care in itself. The device is not only shown as a finished tool, but built live, through gestures of attention and repair. Making becomes a way of staying with the body, with its needs, its limits and its possible alliances with machines.

This is a video teaser for the performance that will be premiered at Sonar+D 2026.

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