Taking innovative approaches to storytelling

Medialabmx is an independent art space and a non-profit organization based in Mexico City and  is “dedicated to the investigation of the connections between Art, Technology, and Politics”. 

They take a broad understanding of media, which for them also includes using technology and art in creative ways for storytelling, and building community. 

 In their project Voz pública, for example, which worked to document accounts of gender violence, they created an online platform for women and non-binary people to anonymously contribute textual and written personal accounts of gender violence. 

Dora Bartilotti, from Medialabmx, explains how they also used textiles and electronics for the project: 

The textile … was [there] to expand the notion of technology, as a technology from which we could work on different metaphors about the relationship between body, territory, textile text, voice, body, and public space. Based on these relationships, a series of textiles were generated that were a sort of spokesperson mechanism that amplified the stories of gender violence that were collected from the online platform.

The online text ended up forming a database of stories that was later or automatically downloaded through the electronic textile and converted into voice through a process of voice synthesis. It had a small program, a micro laptop – and then there are also metaphors between mobility and embodiment; to be able to take these stories to the public space.

Medialabmx have also taken innovative approaches to visualizing and documenting cases of forced disappearances and mining extractivism in Mexico, through mapping practices.