Name of organization : A Casa do Rio
Email address (or preferred and reliable way of contacting you) : acasadorio.arte@gmail.com, Paulapin24@gmail.com
Tell us about your organization and your event team (approx 50-100 words)
A Casa do Rio is a safe space for the LGBTIQ+ community, in which people from all over the world and from diverse cultures, genders and sexual orientations have already been left, grateful for a space in which they can express themselves freely, being supported in what they needed and returning home in many cases, with very valuable self-sustaining tools for life in rural areas. We are an entity accredited by the European Solidarity Corps to send young people (between 18 and 30 years old) to other countries to volunteer, and to host young volunteers from Europe and Mediterranean countries.
A Casa do Rio as association will coordinate through me and Dani the physical resources, as also we work together for the last three years also in connection with The Foundry.
In our association there is a strong inclination to collective processes with free and open technologies through a highly transhackfeminism perspective. We have been carrying many projects on the rural areas of Galicia, some of them based on tradition and others more contemporaneous working on the intersection or art, science and technology, always looking for a more sustain way of implementing the old and the new technologies.
Our aim is to reinforce the capacity to generate networks flowing from rural to urban context supporting non hierarchy and democratic exchanges of knowledge and practices that can enable new and sustainable models within rural contexts. According to that we consider that the new trans-disciplinary creative sectors in which we are entangled can have a huge and positive impact in the creation of this new paradigm even on rural areas that are marginalized and where there is a few people having resources to live and resist there.
Aside from that, there is thematic focus on transdisciplinary feminism and post-humanism. While this focus is not adequately grasped by identity-political categories like race or gender, we hope it leads to the subversion of hegemonic structures inscribed in the binarisms upholding many of these categories. Our interest lies in the development of tools and technologies that subvert contemporary structures of domination, exploitation and marginalization, not in those that reproduce it.
We seek to develop a more sustainable environment by opening up our practices based on a free culture framework, generating networks and interest around them, enabling a flow of exchange of innovation across creative sectors focusing on revaluation of rural contexts and its knowledge heritage.
Does your event team have representation of a marginalized demographic due to factors such as, but not limited to, race, ability, place of birth, gender, sexual orientation, socioeconomic class situation or other identification? If so, how? (approx 25-50 words)
The event aims at addressing the lack of women, queer, trans and diversity in technological fields in general and hacking more specifically. But even more so, it aims at creating a community that critically assesses the hegemonic narratives around technologies, the modernity aspects of its underlining Western assumptions and its inherent capitalist inflections, among others.
Our event
What scientific discipline is your event related to? (approx 10 words)
The science of electronics, electromagnetic and electro.mecanical principles and natural science and technology around this topics.
Describe your event.
The event aims at addressing the lack of women, queer, trans and diversity in technological fields in general and hacking more specifically. But even more so, it aims at creating a community that critically assesses the hegemonic narratives around technologies, the modernity aspects of its underlining Western assumptions and its inherent capitalist inflections, among others.
The main purpose of the event is to develop the electronic part of the Eolic turbine we build the last event. In the first, the focus lies on harvesting the energy of the natural environment, through wind turbines and now we need to control and manage the movements of the turbine through a controller the idea is that all this project will work as escalable power kits that can be used both as pedagogical material and to set up site-specific power plants in different sites as well.
There is a counter-infrastructural component to this work: one possible consequence would be to empower people to generate their own energy instead of relying on large and often extractive companies.
With this project we are working on the learning together processes and hands on experimentation of queer folks into electro-mecanical engines and electro-magnetic areas. With all of that we want to works and develop new approaches on open source but also reinforcing our degree of autonomy.
Recently, transdisciplinary relationships between art, science and technology have led to the emergence of hybrid contexts that not only provided a new conceptual and practical framework for artistic research, but also provoked paradigm shifts that affect other areas of knowledge / cultural areas. We are interested in connecting sustainability and ancestral knowledge to make evidence that autonomous ways of living where there before industrial revolution, and we can still to rescue ways of living more into the rural areas without a complete dependence of big energy companies.
With this fruitful context of creation and experimentation with different practices we are also working to improve the transmission of knowledge as well building new realities through this intersection.
In order to pursue real changes that help to create a more just world, we need to think differently about ourselves, the world and our connections within it, and apply that thinking to artistic educational practice and systemic change. We say this not only to emphasize the thinking and perspectives of communities of practice, but also to apply the extra step taken by critical posthumanism. The collective can be rethought in terms of human and non-human groupings in which all elements share agency, that is to say, treat each other non-hierarchically. This is why we think it is necessary to inscribe our practices in transdisciplinary and post-humanist perspectives.
Include the aims and outcomes, who will be invited and how, how the event will be advertised. Summarize the event timeline, agenda and facilitation plan. (approx 200-250 words)
The goals for the event can be summarized as follows:
• Find points of intersection between traditional knowledges and contemporary practices of self-care, feminism, DIY and open-source technology.
• Promote easily accessible open-source technologies that can be applied in multidisciplinary fields and enhance the inclusiveness of marginalized collectives.
• Foster the adoption of collective practices of mutual self-care. Generate networks from the margins through collaborative research, collective education and social development.
• To work on human and non-human alliances and solidarity through DIY/DIWO/DIT technological practices.
• Re-visit, re-think, co-design and co-develop processes, tools and technologies from a transhackfeminist perspective, and focusing on Open-Source Science for sustaninability and energy.
• To provide artists, scientists, creators and cultural organizations with tools, methodologies and good practices in order to properly address the creation of common cultural spaces for the generation of transversal knowledge in Open source practices, environmental issues and ecology.
To achieve these goals, we propose to elaborate an electronic Kit that provides the needs to implement the physical turbine. After this elaboration the kit will combine DIT (do it together) materials in order to explore energy context.
Summarize the event timeline, agenda and facilitation plan
What type of outputs will result from the event (e.g. reports, documentation, media) and how will you share them? (approx 100-200 words)
An Open source project and kit with an instruction book, wiki and materials list will be the consolidation of the project for future use and dissemination. The whole kit, the materials and the book will be done with Open Source Tools and will be useful for inter-generational students from 14 years old in advance.
**How will your event promote or advance open science hardware within the specified scientific discipline? (approx 100-200 words)**
**How will your event and its outputs have an impact on the broader open science hardware community? (approx 100-200 words)**
The project will be have an impact because it is looking for a more sustainable way of living and also will address a new project into the networks with the aim to collaborate on the open source prototype of the circuit.
**What is the funding for? Describe your budget. List what you are going to spend it on and how. (include a table, no word limit)**
How would your event address GOSH’s values of diversity and inclusion? (approx 50-150 words)
The association and the context itself is highly diverse, we are always looking for more diversity of all kind, usually we make a communication plan in which we reinforce all the diverse groups of people we wanna have, that means all kind of.
Are there any conflicts of interest that you wish to declare? (approx 10-50 words)
no