Handmade Networks presents a body of research-based artworks by Steffen Köhn and Nestor Siré. Their collaborative projects explore how the Cuban people have compensated for their lack of internet connectivity by building massive alternative infrastructures, such as grassroots community computer networks or offline “sneakernets”. They document how Cubans defy material scarcity by recycling or appropriating obsolete technologies, creating digital exchange platforms on messenger applications, or engaging in play-to-earn blockchain games. By examining the resilient and resistive potentials of these vernacular infrastructures, Köhn and Siré’s work also reimagines such networks as viable alternatives to the capitalist, consumerist digital infrastructures controlled by an oligopoly of Big Tech companies that have homogenised the global internet.

Nestor Siré is a Cuban multimedia artist who reflects on the relationship between technology and society through transdisciplinary research. Focusing on different social representations of the concept of creativity, his work shows a parallel narrative of resistance in the global South, from which alternative practices of production and circulation emerge.

Steffen Köhn is a filmmaker, video artist and associate professor of visual and multimodal anthropology at Aarhus University. Entwining experimental ethnography, Science and Technology Studies, and fiction, his work engages with alternative infrastructures and strategies of resistance in today’s uneven sociotechnical landscapes.

COLOPHON

Steffen Köhn, Nestor Siré Handmade Networks

Contributors: Bani Brusadin, Erick J. Mota, Steffen Köhn, Nestor Siré

Editor: Janez Fakin Janša Design and layout: Federico Antonini, Simone Cavallin

Published by: Aksioma – Institute for Contemporary Art, Ljubljana Represented by: Marcela Okretič

Ljubljana, June 2024 | © Aksioma, the authors