Mónica Rikić is a creative coder, electronic artist, educator, but most of all, a tireless creator. A Catalan National Culture Award winner in 2021, she creates weird robots and mechanical creatures, elegantly built using simple materials. She then masterfully brings them to life with programming so they can seduce audiences with movement and behaviour. 

The past few years have seen an important shift in her career. With Somoure - a project that she began during a S+T+ARTS residency in collaboration with Hacte at the Institute of Robotics and Industrial Informatics (IRI CSIC-UPC) - she’s dived into the world of social and healthcare robotics from an interdisciplinary and, above all, critical perspective. She uses the project to ask why the debate on the implementation of robots in the care sector is so focused on social acceptance, rather than the surrounding structural problems: the precarious status of care workers and the progressive privatisation of the entire sector, among others. Instead of presenting robotics as a neutral solution, Somoure uses artistic experimentation to question how assistive technologies are designed, who they serve, and what forms of dependency and autonomy they produce. The project redefines care from submission to resistance, as an act of autonomy, vitality, and queer cyberfeminist imagination. 

At Sónar+D she presents this line of work with an appearance that moves between lecture, performance and demonstration, accompanied on-stage by her robots and surrounded by cameras that offer close-ups and intimate views of her use of technology as a practice of care. A thought-provoking and creative way - typical of Mónica - to address a complex subject.