Originally conceived by architect Gustavo Crembil and artist Paula Gaetano Adi as an artistic proposition aimed at understanding how technoscience is produced, appropriated, and transformed in Latin America; Mestizo Robotics is now an open platform for the development of embodied and enactive artificial life that challenges the systems of art, crafts, and technologies upon which the modern/colonial world was built.

Inspired by the lessons of mestizaje, Mestizo Robotics calls to resist western utopian and dystopian dreams populated with super-intelligent, anthropomorphic and responsive machines, emphasizing bottom-up processes by which intelligence emerges and evolves in lived experience, particularly in interactions with the environments that enhance the robot’s present situation. Mestizo Robotics is not only the first community of ‘mud robots,’ but also an ongoing open-call for artists, designers, researchers, and inventors to decolonize robotics and to create their own ‘mestizo technocreatures’ that blend robotic technologies with traditional crafts, vernacular cultures, and DIY making.