 Welcome back. The second part of this afternoon, or night, or morning, depending where you are. In our solar-punk place-making channel. And this afternoon, I have the pleasure to be joined by my friend Julio, which I will introduce in a second. And Julio will host a series of very interesting events throughout the whole day. And it will end up tonight. It's going to be the very intense day for Julio. We will make sure that we're going to bring him enough water and food and massage on the shoulder for the whole day. So Julio Linares is an economic anthropologist. His work explores the relationship between money, direct democracy, technology, and basic income. He went to the LSE, the London School of Economics, after having lived and worked in Taiwan for six years. I think he's speak like a bunch of different dialects as well. In a very well proficient way. And he's now serving as a social outreach for the Basic Income Hearth Network. Julio is from Guatemala. He's currently based in Berlin and working on the Circle UBI. Project, which is a universal basic income project on the blockchain. And yeah, he will be hosting the entirety of today. I just leave the whole stage to him. And I'm going to make him some tea and some other stuff that he can enjoy. Thank you, Virginia. Thank you all for being here today. First, we apologize for the timing. This is all, of course, a bit of a jazz. I would like to welcome two comrades from Latin America, Constanza and Meli, who have formed the collective Cyberpunk Girls. Constanza is joining us from Taiwan, which we're wearing in Taiwan. And then Melisa is also joining us from Mexico, the Efe. So we have quite a very interesting triangulation going on here. And yeah, I basically leave the space open for them to so they can present what Terry Girls is, the collective, what they do. And yeah, welcome. Thanks Julio. Thanks for having us. Also, I would like to briefly say that we are also streaming this talk on Radio Cosmica, which is another project that we'll present later. And you can tune in also to hear the audio from Mensajito through the link that we put on the chat. And well, yeah. So Constanza and I are part of Cyber Girls, which is a collective that we found in Mexico City in 2017. Because we started, we wanted to know what women and sexual decisions and non-binary people were crafting and creating in Mexico City back in 2017. And we needed to create community. So we wanted to get together and to learn. And that's why we started the meeting, Cyber Girls. So maybe Constanza, do you want to talk a little bit of how we started? Hello, everybody. When we started in 2017, the idea was to meet with other women and non-binary people in Mexico City. First Cyber Girls, we don't do, we don't need an open call. Just we meet with local communities, some groups, the women group participating in the hacker space in Mexico City, or also women doing traditional technology. And then after the first Cyber Girls, we did an open call and more people from other countries can join us. Yeah. So basically, as Constanza said, what we do is we get together to make handwork mostly and to create our own kind of language through the work that we make. We believe that each practice has its own technique and language and that all practices are valuable. We communicate through craft as a strategy of non-verbal communication and sharing knowledge makes us inclusive in practices that are usually exclusive. We believe that creating and crafting together creates community. And we are retaking the strategies to create community by bringing back the craft that because of gender division did not belong to us as women or that was believed as such. And we feel pride for the knowledge and practices of the grandmas and ancestral knowledge as well. So yeah, we've been holding this event for almost three years. We took a pause this 2020. But we, like in the traditional craft section or practices that we have, for example, we have a fan scene fair, we have like a collage workshops and also we have things not so traditional that are more related to electronics. So we create circuits, we work with open source, we also host biohacking workshops. For us, the most important thing in our meeting is to be together and share affection and create safe spaces for everybody and inclusive spaces. We try to include all technologies and new technologies. And also for us our start point is our body. And also we try to claim our safe space for us on internet. And also we try to think in a feminist way to create, to recreate the idea of technologies, including spiritual values and also political values. Yeah, as Constanza said, the main thing is to get together and to, and the body as a technology is something very important. So as you can see here in the picture, we have many bodies back in the days when this was a possible thing. The gathering of people and changing, as she was saying, changing our relationship to technology is something super important. So I think it's important to highlight our relation to the internet also because of all this virtual format we are having in this event. And well, we believe that internet is a common resource and we advocate for free internet and the defense of digital rights. That is why we teach workshops on tales and digital security and we make himself parties. We reflect about the internet, its privatization and the need to defend the freedom in the virtual realm. So we seek to encourage people to use internet in an anonymous way and in find alternatives ways to use the internet. And well, also as the same idea of the internet being open, we like our workshops to be open. I think it's important to highlight this, that we want them to be accessible to everyone and they are of really low cost or no cost at all. It depends on the person that is hosting the workshop and also we see our meeting as a common. This means that it's made out of the effort of everybody, of all the participants and each one contributes in a different way. You have to bring your own gear but also be able to share it and you bring your working materials. We provide some materials and everything is shared. But also it's very important for us to share our knowledge with everybody. We feel this is also like a common and that is one of the most important things of the meeting, that everything is for everyone. Which takes us to the idea that somehow we still follow these ancient principles, maybe Constance, do you want to talk a little bit about this? See, that is an idea from our ancestors in Andean area in South America. It's mean Buen vivir en español. It's a way to live in the planet, thinking in the planet is alive and we have to take care of each other and also we have to try to live in a good way and take care of the earth and our resources. For us it's important also in the Techno Feminist Meeting to include ancestral technologies. Because also in South America or whole Latin America there are technologies connected with the nature as plants, natural medicines, medicines with cannabis or connected to a spiritual life. So that's the idea to map outside another way to live, including our body connected with the earth. Yeah, exactly. Yes, so here are some examples of the workshops that Constanza was talking about. We had this workshop which was about magical keys for freedom and yeah it was about bringing back the ancestral knowledge from our grandmask into the contemporary world. Also we believe that as Constanza was saying that there is this political notion of technology that we want to bring up so we really feel like the use of technology as we want to share it has definitely a political side to it. So we for example give these workshops about the political notion of coding and life coding also with a feminist perspective. And we also work a lot with the idea of decolonizing and how do we decolonize? Well first of all we don't sell, we share the knowledge and what we create and what we teach is not meant to be sold in a capitalist, colonialist market. It's another thing, it's a different thing. We want to create a different economy, a different society, a different alternative to that patriarchal system. And so we believe that our practices decolonize for the mere fact that getting together gives back to the spiritual and political sense of the community and especially the sharing between women that were excluded from the most commercial aspects of craft. And as we say and as we believe the main idea of the meeting is to recreate the technological imaginaries from Latin American feminist speculation and therefore we are decolonizing knowledge too which is kind of related to the idea of place making that we will talk about a little bit later. So Constanza do you want to add a little bit to it? Not just to say because the pandemic this year we can do just one week of our meeting, normally it's two weeks. And we don't continue in an online version because we we prefer to be to keep time for us to think how we can continue but now it's difficult to think because we don't know if next year we can do it or not. Now you can read our statement that we write on our our blog on internet. We have to write a letter about the situation this year because we try to think in in the the world change this year but we are continuous thinking in a feminist way to to be together using including technologies but not maybe not only online but we are thinking about how we can we can be on internet and also in person. For us it's important to meet and to see each other and touch each other. So for now we mainly and me we are working in the archive of the cyborg year. Now in the website you can read the biographies of almost all the participants during this four year that we are doing this the cyborg year techno feminist meeting. So just for for this year and see and also we now we our meeting is participating in the in the index. Mindy is you did this project and it's online that is a good archive with a lot of feminist cyber feminist project around the world and we are participating in with cyborg year and also other other friends from latin america are also including this index. Yeah that's right so for now you can just like check our website and join us virtually with our resources and for sure check the index. Yeah maybe we can do a little recap here. We also so yeah what we usually do is the format is usually two weeks of the cyber multiversity which is like the other world's university that we call the workshops that we have in different spaces in the both in the city and in the periphery and in the end we have a weekend of performances fan scenes fair and concerts and talks. So here you can see some of the pictures of our of our closing I think this was in 2018 probably 2018 or 2019 and well as we said we also did alternative ways of a genealogy we have in a punk workshops and biohacking workshops because we believe in reclaiming our bodies as technology and so here are some images of the transplant workshop we had with our friends from chimera rosa backing I think it was in 2018. Also we have an area we receive video it's called cyborg cinema and see we we have a good selection from different countries and and sometimes when Nellie and me go to another country we bring these cinema to other places. Yeah so yeah cyborg cinema is a way of if the girls that are somewhere else in the world they can't come because we don't have funding really we are self-sustained and we don't really have sponsors or anything so this is a way that girls from all over the world can participate with us and well maybe highlighting a little bit a some of the of our communication materials that we use for the for every year we collaborate with different designers and illustrators and every year we change the image a little bit of the of the meeting but we always keep the idea of the cyborg influenced by Donna Hardaway's idea of the cyborg and we also try to do a little bit of merch like a tote box and shirts and stuff like that to to maintain ourselves and well Constanza said that you can check the the archive we are building in in our website and yeah so we had to postpone the meeting this year right and but we've definitely we definitely want to find a way to make it because right now we are around 160 cyber girls from 14 countries so we've realized that this meeting is really necessary is a is something that we need and we want and that is a really I don't know that it fits our souls in a way it sounds very romantic but it's true we didn't have this before and we realized that that building community is super super important cyber girls for me is a very good example of place making because constantly we are a finding ways to meet and to share and it's hard to do so in the in the current scenario right but but we are a strong community I mean a proof of that is like like the expectation that we have this year and that the community had this year too for the meeting to happen and so we are really just like waiting for the moment to make it again and yeah in the meantime just join us at cybergirls.wordpress.com and stay tuned in our social media and yeah nice thank you so much that was really really insightful and interesting it was that was really drawn by this idea of producing knowledge through the body in Guatemala when I'm from the community feminist talk about these two territories of the fence the the body territory and then the land territory I was curious about in terms of technology what how would you place that or territory territorialized like thinking about it through the body as an extension I guess I don't know um what were you can you repeat that part of a of as an extension of the body technology as an extension of the body you were saying yeah or also an extension of the land or I don't know exactly yeah as an extension of the land like what happens with this space that is the internet like what do we have to do there we definitely believe in reclaiming what the free portion that is left of the internet we definitely think about this a lot like and and I was listening yesterday to Lorena Cabnal that she talks about this the territory of the body and the territory of the land and how is this extended to the virtual realm right it's a big question for all of us and I think it's something that we need to think about because you don't really think about like a I don't know a portion of land in the internet as such but I mean if you think of the servers for example and and the physical space that the whole infrastructure of the internet takes it makes you want to have like your own server I don't know like what is the real autonomy uh in in the virtual our world uh physical world is we have a patriarchal and capitalism system and if a feminist community create an extension of our land on internet we can share a little bit the system inside of the system for that is important to open new spaces for feminism, cyber feminism, techno feminism, trans feminism because yeah the world now is collapsing the humanity and our way to live in this planet is is uh damage no it's a continuous damage so now for that we think important to create spaces for for women and no binary people in on internet and also physical mm-hmm yeah uh well yeah it's uh so basically how to think about this virtual feudalism that is now the internet and how to make it an autonomous zone uh yeah it's a very interesting question yeah I like that concept that you just throw in virtual feudalism yeah well because now we have all these big amazons and the facebooks and we're kind of like in their land and they're just kind of extracting data from us uh we don't own it right it doesn't belong to us uh it feels like like it's supposed to be something free and the commons but it's really not uh we are just the we are the product now so how do you reclaim that space with these servers with these um material infrastructures also uh that's also is a question right um and also you mentioned about uh jeanette punk um this is done by uh a friend of ours common friend of ours clout uh and uh I guess that's that's an example I guess of how how to also reclaim most of these practices and knowledges of the body and also like in a way that is more autonomous I guess no can you talk maybe a little bit more about that uh to explain to people you know what that is and how that works for those who are not so familiar with the concept so this is a project that clout kinky our friend she participated in all the virtual of cyborg air um she is doing DIY be allowed for a gynecological affection uh and she is trying to include uh natural medicines and also she's doing DIY microscopy and and also um she is doing conversation about sexuality and and also about um um how we can take care by uh ourselves uh and she now is uh it has an open space on on facebook for people that have some uh problems you can ask directly there and maybe she can not answer but other people participating in this group can share medicines or or you can help other in because you know that um the healthy system in not every country country is good for uh for example for abortion or no say there are a lot of discrimination with trans people and so for that the gynecological network is important uh on internet and also out of internet we every year have a space for in a pink uh laboratory in uh in techno feminist meeting because we think it's the important space for everybody i can we have maybe this is related to a question um that was asked just now by julcey which is uh how to connect ancestral technology and cyber technology uh and also asking about the connection and knowledge connection or or yeah synergy between cyber cyber feminist or cyber feminist uh or cyber girls and in indigenous communities so coming back to i guess also what lorena kabnel was saying before about the territory yeah so let's think about binary code like the base for contemporary computers uh a constanza we probably depend on this but binary code uh is uh based on ancestral knowledge so and we have uh the example of accounting systems a a ancestral counting systems that were also used to make a the computers the computer programming that we use nowadays so that is a very direct link uh between uh the the knowledge of ancestral technology and cyber technology say also for example uh this year during uh the hack uh hack feminist uh activity the first weekend of cyborg girl uh we we meet in um in a hacker space in la chinam by the name um and in la periferia the mexico city and we include a group of indigenous people woman that uh they know uh nabat nabat is is a language all language in mexico indigenous language and they we are trying to create a code uh using nabat because uh almost all the uh code or language for programming uh start with english no and if you want to learn code first you you have to learn english and then to understand not to learn code and they are changing this way and they are trying to include other language and in this workshop uh this group of women they teach us uh nabat and we try to change some uh words uh and we try to include this language to do to do live coding or i don't know we in this moment we are we are uh trying to do live coding so for for us it's important to try to to change our um our way to do um to use a software or hardware we are trying to include other cosmo vision that's very interesting and about this binary code uh is it possible to create non-binary forms of code? That's a good question. How to do non-binary forms of code this this yeah maybe also onto this question of using nabat nabat as a form of coding i don't know just do you think is there i don't know is there such a thing as analog coding yeah that's a very good idea yeah we'll check if there are any other questions from the audience not so far nice um if not i will ask also like maybe a final question and maybe you can also yeah use some final reflections um like what what do you think is the biggest challenge in in organizing uh i guess before corona is now adding the corona pandemic is also a bit more complex but how how to get this this these practices this epistemologies these forms of organization also um into the general mind of people uh how to how to hack the the culture let's say uh because that's what you're doing in the way like for me it was very inspiring to hear you so what are the biggest challenges you think in actually facing these big uh structures like the patriarchal structures the capital structures how to hack that uh well i think one of the biggest challenges is to make it sustainable to make the meeting sustainable in a way because um well we do it all ourselves and uh we have a team of about five people that are like deep on it besides so the the workshop presenters and the people that you talk and everything but at the core is like we are a group of a limited group of a group of not so many people it's not so much maybe about the amount of people but rather um the time because we all have like side jobs to these and uh and the and so like we need to make time to organize the meeting in the meeting and it's like extra work so like in a way uh we try to escape uh to the to the um to the limitations let's say of a the capitalist world but we are still in it so we need to balance out right like we need to like find time to do the the meeting things that techno feminist meeting things and also the other things um it's like this problem with uh like the issue with um the home workers let's say like you know they work in they have a full-time job but when they get home they also have this other job which is working at their home and it's not seen as a as a work so i don't know for me that's one challenge how about you constanza no i'm thinking about uh saying i don't know for me now it's difficult to think um because i don't know the pandemic changed the world eating one day yeah uh all our expectations all our plans changed so for me now it's difficult to think in solutions or i don't know now i am trying to to to be quiet and listen just this but i have no answer for a lot of things now because every day the thing changed and it's difficult to think about yeah and in taiwan how is the situation now is it also a lot of things happening with corona or is it more like like okay or how is the situation how are you here yeah there is not covid no no because they close the border in the beginning of the pandemic and now they have any case but they are strict strict when when you enter you have to be in quarantine during two weeks in a hotel a special hotel so no no it's not problematic situation sounds like a good place to think from to listen from all right and do you have any final reflections uh any any comments anything you would like to share the audience otherwise you can start flowing into our uh it's the terrestrial soon the next radio show yeah no i think uh just stay tuned to see whatever we come up with in this pandemic time and um check the cyber feminism index because you will find a lot of good things there we will post the the link on the on the qnh tab and uh yeah let's just hear our friends from the excel fair stills and thanks so much for having us thanks so much for inviting us this was mainly that it there is it's our pleasure but there is a question for you it's um did somebody check the website and they want to know what's gonna happen the 8th of march if you have a radio channel or make her in your groups on the 8th of march uh well i guess we need to figure that out constancy if we're gonna do anything if we if we if we the question if if if we are doing cyber gear right here or what yeah it's uh in 2021 um no now we don't have plan any plan yet yeah yeah we need to find the time and place whenever constancy and i can to figure out what are we gonna do okay and you can say any final thoughts or comments you want to share with everybody no thank you for joining us and listen to this conversation and and yeah if you have time you can search our web and we have a lot of projects to share because the idea is to promote the the work of people and in latin america principally and see yes for now it's a website almost all the information that we do these during the four years of cyber gear well amazing thank you so much for sharing your your your knowledge your your your experiences and yeah i'm almost solidary thank you so much yeah great thank you so now can we take a pause yeah we'll take a five-minute pause to set up our set the best here uh our next speaker and of course you're all welcome to stay and join us uh yeah and we'll be back in a little moment