Somoure iii

Somoure is an ongoing artistic research project exploring assistive robotics through an interdisciplinary perspective. Initiated during a S+T+ARTS residency at the Barcelona Institute of Industrial Robotics (IRI, CSIC-UPC), it critiques the focus on improving social acceptance of this type of robotics without addressing systemic issues like caregiving precarity and privatization.

The project’s artistic output involves developing an artistic approach to a feeding-assistive robot, incorporating critical perspectives on its design and behaviour. Adopting hacker and maker philosophies, Somoure frames robotics development as a caregiving process in itself.

Through collective discussions, workshops, and co-design methodologies, the project brings together engineers, artists, sociologists, migrant domestic labour unions, philosophers, anti-ableist activists, senior individuals, and the general public, highlighting how artistic research can transform assistive technologies to address communal needs and reframe care within broader political and social contexts.

In this third part of the project, presented as a performance, Mónica Rikić explores the process of making technology as a form of care in itself. The device is not shown only as a finished tool, but built live, through gestures of attention and repair. Making becomes a way of staying with the body, its needs, its limits, and its possible alliances with machines.

This is a video essay, and the project is also staged as a performance that premiered at Sónar+D 2026.