HISTORY

MCNC is an itinerant feminist laboratory founded in 2020 by Sophia Arrazola, a Guatemalan transdisciplinary artist, social design strategist, and futures researcher. The project emerged as a safe, inclusive, community-based space that seeks to restore agency over public space to women and communities in vulnerable contexts. Working across art, critical and resistance pedagogies, public space, and social practice, Sophia conceives and designs MCNC’s projects, shaping their conceptual, methodological, and impact frameworks and translating them into situated participatory experiences. In 2021, Mexican artist, clown, mediator, and futurist Jesica Bastidas joined the project’s core, activating and sustaining its relational dimension through the body, play, listening, and artistic mediation with diverse publics. Through collaborative processes, MCNC brings together artists, futurists, urbanists, designers, sociologists, anthropologists, ecologists, and other cultural practitioners to imagine more just ways of inhabiting, caring for, and transforming the commons. Throughout its development, MCNC has been guided by Rosi Álvarez, a Guatemalan expert in gender, methodologies, and mediation, who has accompanied internal processes of organization and strategic decision-making. The project has also integrated project-based collaborations, such as that of Mexican architect and industrial designer Monserrat Padilla, who has contributed through material and spatial design in selected projects.