Guanaquerx
Paula Gaetano Adi is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice calls for a new technical imagination that radically attends to the world-making capacity of both technology and the arts.
Artist BioGuanaquerx 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.
Creative Capital Carnival 2023
Paula Gaetano Adi
Pawtucket, RI
Paula Gaetano Adi is an Argentine-born artist working in robotics, sculpture, and performance. Her practice calls for a new technical imagination that radically attends to the world-making capacity of both technology and the arts. Opening up an alternative poetics-politics and attending to the messy entanglements in which the human and nonhuman are inextricably linked, Gaetano Adi’s robotic work draws from diverse situated, relational, and vernacular technological practices and stresses a praxis of living and being that considers intelligence and the human as irrevocably embodied, collective, and affective. She has exhibited and showcased work extensively in museums, conferences, and art festivals throughout Europe, Asia, and the Americas, in locales such as the National Art Museum of China; Matadero Madrid; Mejan Labs gallery, Stockholm; Sesc São Paulo; Vancouver Art Gallery; Pera Museum, Istanbul; Centro Nacional de las Artes, Mexico City; and Ars Electronica, Linz, Austria, among others. Gaetano Adi’s robot Alexitimia was awarded the first prize in the international competition VIDA Art and Artificial Life and the first prize of LIMBØ from the Buenos Aires Museum of Modern Art, and her Mestizo Robotics long-term project has been distinguished with Fundación Telefónica’s award for Ibero American artists. Former fellow at Argentina’s National Endowment for the Arts; the Center for Research in Engineering, Media and Performance at UCLA; and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute’s Experimental Media Performing Arts Center, she currently lives between San Juan, Argentina, and Providence, RI, where she is associate professor of Experimental and Foundation Studies at the Rhode Island School of Design.