Liliana Zaragoza Cano

Hackfeminist artist and community organizer
MEXICO

Liliana (Ellae/They) is a hack-feminist queer artist, writer, community organizer, and producer, originally from Guadalajara, México. They imagine, design and rewrite landscapes, languages, and worlds. Their work interconnects pathways between body, poetry, collective memory, resistance, feminist infrastructures, digital collective care, radical imagination, sound landscapes, and affective technologies. They are a co-founder of Laboratorio de Interconectividades, and co-creator of transfeminist projects, workshops, and gatherings to eradicate (online) gender-based violence and create safer and joyful spaces for women, trans, non-binary, LGBTQ2IA* people, and BIPOC. They practice martial arts and hiking, deep listening, stargazing, and sometimes they remix beats. See more of their work on their website and Twitter.

For me, art is a revolutionary technology for liberation; to sustain life and hope.
Liliana Zaragoza Cano

What role do you think art can play in social change?

For me, art is a revolutionary technology for liberation; to sustain life and hope. Since I decided to take an active role in social change that would allow the world to become a liberated territory and a safer space for all, I have journeyed through various explorations, languages, spaces, codes, and expanded ways of expressiveness. I have been involved with social movements for nearly 25 years, as an activist, popular educator, community organizer, and as a human rights defender. In this journey, it has been my task to constantly reimagine the various ways of resistance that hold us together; how to strengthen the relationship between art, activism and collective memory; and how radical imagination and affective technologies can become the root of social justice, collective healing, and liberation. I have always wondered where to weave from, how to co-inspire, and from what cracks to think, co-create, subvert, and transform together. I enjoy imagining from the fissures, from the flows and from the power of the affects and the bodies in tune, to become part of a deep thought that pollinates through spores that crack rusty and unsustainable systems, and that rewrite futures and spread a sense of community in everyday action.

How would you describe your artistic practice as it relates to supporting social movements?

I work with the body as our first technology, territory and infrastructure to inhabit, care for, and to defend. In every project that I'm involved in the nearly 14 years, I understand intimacy, privacy, and anonymity without dichotomizing online/offline or real/virtual, and instead I work holistically, from a hackfeminist perspective. My work contribute to expand our imaginaries about what we understand by bodies and technologies, from our situated contexts and our community memory, as an integral part of our world, affects, dreams, social realities, and resistances.

An essencial part of my projects is to develop, create, and facilitate workshops as immersive experiences, and at the same time, as safer spaces for hackfeminist experimentation for women, trans, non-binary, and LGBTQ2IA* people. These projects plays with collectively build knowledge, storytelling, creative methodologies and narratives, community technologies, popular education pedagogies, deep listening, world-building, and speculative science fiction techniques, to reconnect with the power of imagination as a technology of resistance, joy, and hope.

Featured work

Mirada sostenida (Sustained Gaze) is a transmedial project in which the artist work with the resignification of personal and collective memory as an act of resistance. The project accompany all the 11 women survivors that were sexually tortured in Atenco (México) in an act of State repression, in their struggle to obtain justice. https://miradasostenida.net
Mirada Sostenida (sustained gaze0 is a transmedial project in which the artist makes memory as an act of resistance. The project accompanies 11 women who were sexually tortured in Mexico in an act of state repression through their struggle for justice through 14 years.
The Time-traveler Robotae it's an oracle that algorithmically resonates lines of the infinite poem “There is No Future without Collective Memory”, with bits of hope. (twitter.com/circuit_futura). Project co-created with Steffania Paola; illustration by Maggie Haughey.
Circuit Futura is an infinite poem: ““No hay futuro sin memoria colectiva” (There is no future without collective memory), as a thread-manifesto on the artist’s personal twitter account.