Communication Guild 2025-2026

How is memory built, cared for, preserved, and shared? What infrastructures, institutions, and actors do we rely on to create and preserve our memory? How do we create the archive and its files (.jpg, .pdf, .txt, etc.)? How do we relate to data, its centres and its peripheries?

 Through these questions, Barby and Ezequiel explore the poetics and politics of memory. Dealing with issues of technological sovereignty (critique of technofeudalism, lo-fi aesthetics, open-source practices...) of epistemic and decolonial repair and of living archives, we seek to question the structures (technical, political and institutional) on which narratives and memories are built.

The guild's work is based on research (theoretical and practical) and inter-guild collaboration, creating partnerships with the various residents of the Santa Mònica. Its main actions take shape in the "The Garden of Memory" event (June 2026) and the research project "Seeds, Automatons, and Living Things", regarding the public, accessible and independent dimension of the residence prototypes.

Barby Boustier and Ezequiel Soriano

Biographies:

Barby is a travesti, performing artist, communicator, and researcher based between Rio de Janeiro and Barcelona. For more than two decades, at the Jongo da Serrinha Cultural Center, she has woven practices of anticolonial communication and living memory that refuse to become folklore, data, or a dead archive.
During her residency at Santa Mònica, she investigates the aesthetics of the collective: not as a sum of voices nor as the management of communities, but as a territory of friction where form emerges from shared care, from the minor gesture, and from a listening that is stitched together in common.
Through podcasts, articles, workshops, drawings, micro-stories, and low-intensity animations, she explores what she calls “practices of insistence”: downscaled resources and conscious technologies that produce density of meaning without extracting life.
Her work confronts the epistemic violence of hegemonic narratives and the dehumanization accelerated by artificial intelligence, proposing instead an archive that does not freeze, but moves, distorts, and is inhabited through the body.
In dialogue with Brazilian jongo, the fugitive sounds of Granada, and the political fictions of the Global South, Barby sows opacity, cares for the transitive, and opens breaches through which to imagine worlds that do not fit within the map of Silicon Valley. For her, little is enough. The minimal expands. And memory, when practiced in common, is the ground from which world-making continues.

Ezequiel Soriano is an anthropologist and artist interested in digital orality, automation processes, and creative plagiarism. Through textual experimentation and ethnographic research, he explores everyday practices that play with disciplinary mechanisms in order to disturb them. He directs the editorial laboratory Artefactos Nativos and co-directs the ADS research team (algorithmic cultures, data ecologies, and synthetic media) at the University of Santiago de Compostela, where he is an associate researcher. He has collaborated with research and artistic production centres such as the Santa Mònica Art Centre, la Escocesa, Medialab Matadero, Hangar, the CCCB, the UB, the UOC, and the Institute of Network Cultures.