ACADEMIA DE ARTES Y OFICIOS ELECTRÓNICOS

In October 2014, I started a personal journey along the Pan-American Highway, a route connecting nearly all the countries in the Western Hemisphere of the continent. My goal was to establish contact with contemporary subcultures in Latin America, focusing on noise, electronic art, queer culture, DIY, and DITO practices.

Over the course of 22 months, I traveled through 10 countries, during which I founded a temporary autonomous school called the “Academy of Arts and Crafts Electronic.” This nomadic, wall-less space, the precariousness of media, active participation, autonomy, simplicity, technological disobedience, subversion, and electronic anarchy were strategies to rethink art, technology, and education, especially in places where concepts like medialabs, fablabs, or makerspaces were still limited to a small group, while the true makers thrived in the neighborhoods.

The Academy of Arts and Crafts Electronic thus became a participatory space connecting art from displaced circles of art, reclaiming traditional crafts and knowledge, and for people who make noise for the simple fact of existing.