Blake Shaw is a hacker working at the intersection of software, critical pedagogy, and telecommunication technologies. His work treats software as a medium for formalizing social relations between people, hacking as the discipline of intervening in such reified relations, and dialectical pedagogy. His work typically involves workshops with grassroots activists to produce software solutions to their problems.

An active member of Mexico City’s Biquini Wax EPS collective, Jose is a graduate of the SOGEM writer’s school, as well as the co-editor of publishing houses Libros Caballo and Libros Fantasma.

A writer and an artist, Paloma Contreras Lomas has developed a practice in which literature and fiction play a major role, allowing her to address a series of topics regarding race and class that are rarely broached by a traditional Mexican society. Positioning herself as operating from a feminine condition rather than a feminist stand, the artist claims her right to confront those particular political issues that have historically been associated with male libido, such as the relationship between nationalism and the occupation and instrumentalization of territory, and the further inscription of an extractive global economy. From that perspective, Contreras’s work seems to inscribe itself as the next logical step after the 1990’s activist take of artists like Minerva Cuevas, giving a much broader context to those very same issues as she reframes them at point in (Mexican) history in which gender violence, and the voices against it, have reached a peak. The artist’s amalgamation of narrative, film, performance, drawing, and sculpture offers alternative approaches to address social urgencies from a very personal, and sometimes autobiographical, perspective.

Contreras is also a part of the Mexican artist collective Bikini Wax, formed in 2011. Bikini Wax founded an artist-run space whose undertakings have been characterized by a multidisciplinary and pedagogical approach to art.