Hi, I am Paz, a participatory researcher who prefers to work in contexts that might intimidate some people: contexts with limited resources and complex problems. I perform best when we strive for radical collaboration instead of vertical and/or expert-led decision-making. I dream of sciences that are decolonial and consistently participatory; sciences that incorporate the knowledge(s) of non-scientists. My work spans open science, governance, and communication, with outputs ranging from hardware toolkits to impact evaluations. I bring an equity-focused lens to global research collaborations.

In 2017, with the financial support of Numies, through the conference «Knowledge, Cultures and Ecologies,» we organised a series of workshops in Argentina and Chile to replicate an open-source wooden drone called Flone (flone.cc). Thus, Project Vuela was born. The previous video mostly shows the last workshop, to which we invited conference attendees to witness the first flight of the drone, which was built over the previous weeks by neighbours, researchers, technologists and community organisers (the “crew”).

Before Vuela, in 2017, we received a small funding from the Hivos and Baltan Laboratories’ programme Age of Wonderland, 100 days of Learning (around 300usd), and we organised a series of 7 workshops with community organisers from two neighbourhoods, Teniente Merino Alto and Francisco Werchez, at the foot of the El Sombreo hill. The idea with the workshops was to collectively light up the hill, meaning paying attention to the hill as an urban shared space, and do so by building simple technology artefacts, batteryless handlights, and then going up the hill and flashing the lights at night. The idea was that anyone who showed up in the first workshop would invite other friends or family to the second and teach them how the light making worked. We used discarded plastic bottles, and for the motors, we got them from old printers from Chilenter (IG: chilenter_fundacion). We organised the workshops with Jeffe Van Holle, a Belgian designer (https://franche.be/).