Federico Pérez Villoro: World Wide Waters

Ocean-Archive.org Digital Residency 2025

HIDROARPA, installation view, ACME, Mexico City, Mexico, 2025

Digital Academy Residencies Residencies Ocean-Archive.org TBA21–Academy Current

As part of his digital residency, Federico Pérez Villoro is investigating the entanglements between digital infrastructures and water bodies, with a particular focus on the Caribbean. In collaboration with Tactical Tech's Exposing the Invisible, Federico is leading a series of activations as part of OCEAN /UNI's program, convening a group of artists, journalists, data scientists and geographers to examine and better understand the energy levels and water consumption needed to run data servers, as well as the material effects of underwater systems designed to streamline global computation in the Caribbean region. These networks transcend geographic boundaries and local regulations, increasing the influence of private powers. In this context, technology companies are assuming new political roles by dictating social norms within their infrastructures.

Building on the findings of these Activations, Federico will develop an interface that visualizes sensitive water sources as well as possible industry abuses such as unauthorized water extraction, contamination and improper sewage disposal. A process where maps are not determinant but interrogative. The project will function as an entry point to socialize the findings and methodologies proposed by the group, a repository of a variety of tools for collective mapping and open-source spatial representation. Through this residency, he seeks to expand methods of inquiry and digital visualization to reveal hidden interdependencies between water and data flows.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Federico Pérez Villoro is an artist and researcher living and working in Mexico City. His work studies the industrialization of water as an example of the imposition of technical operativity upon living ecosystems. It has been exhibited internationally at institutions such as Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Monterrey (MARCO), Museo de Arte de Zapopan (MAZ), Espacio Odeón, Casa del Lago UNAM, Centre A Vancouver, Museo de Filatelia de Oaxaca (MUFI) and Palm Springs Art Museum (PSAM) and has been published by Luna Córnea, ADOCS, DELUS, The Serving Library, Printed Matter, C Magazine, Gato Negro Ediciones, diSONARE, the Walker Art Center as well as featured in journalistic outlets such as Quinto Elemento Lab, The New York Times, Aristegui Noticias among others. In 2023, he received the Jumex Grant Program Award from the Jumex Arte Contemporáneo Foundation and the C/Change Fellowship from the Goethe-Institut and Gray Area in San Francisco, United States. That same year, he was a resident at Pivô Pesquisa in São Paulo, Brazil, and in 2019, he was a resident at OCAT in Shenzhen, China. He is currently a research resident at TBA21, where he collaborates with Tactical Tech to investigate access to fresh water in the Caribbean. Federico has taught at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) and California College of the Arts (CCA). He has lectured, ran workshops and acted as a guest critic at schools such as Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), New York University (NYU), ETH Zurich, Rutgers University, CalArts, The New School, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM), Escuela de Artes Jalisco, and Hongik University. In 2019, he founded Materia Abierta, a summer school on theory, art, and technology in Mexico City developed in collaboration with Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo (MUAC), Museo Tamayo, Casa del Lago UNAM, KADIST, among other organizations. In 2013, Federico received an MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design.

ABOUT THE ARTISTIC PRACTICE

Federico's practice explores the ways in which state, corporate and institutional power materializes through the strategic use of information technologies. Through texts, installations, videos and mathematical resources, the artist investigates the operational qualities of images, allowing us to go beyond their symbolic dimension, revealing the political layers and economic interests present in their production and circulation. In his recent work, Federico studies the industrialization of water as an example of the imposition of this same technical operativity on living ecosystems and the artificial construction of the landscape as an aesthetic technology of domination. Interested in the use of cartographic tools for the production of space and the containment of movement within spaces, Federico studies the militarization of rivers as borders. He also investigates the environmental implications of hydroelectric industries and how the domestication of bodies of water transforms them into technical objects and legal subjects. Pérez Villoro's practice seeks to destabilize our technical complicity, disorienting the functional expectations of various computational technologies. This act of disorienting produces evidence of the violence of extractive industries to point toward sociotechnical expressions of material reciprocity endemic to specific territories.

ABOUT THE DIGITAL RESIDENCY

The Ocean-Archive.org Digital Residency is a digital fellowship opportunity that investigates the potential of storytelling and transdisciplinary collaboration within and beyond archival practices. Residents are invited to engage with the Archive as a digital ecosystem; explore and re-interpret its depths, add new research material, and interweave it into their own curatorial narrative. While interacting with each of the Ocean-Archive.org's digital tentacles—the Archive, Journeys, ocean comm/uni/ty, and OCEAN / UNI—the residency aims to question the notion of archives as repositories of the past, locked and inaccessible; but rather to understand them as living organisms where elements constantly resurface, active and in dialogue with each other.