Alumni Profile: Daniela Guerrero aka NINA NINA

SFPC Alumni Profiles is a series featuring students who are practicing poetic computation in their communities and work.

Where are you from and where are you living now?

NINA NINA: I was born in the belly of the moon (Mexico), in the small coastal city of Coatzacoalcos, Veracruz. In 2010, I moved to Mérida, Yucatán, where I lived for 14 years. Since January of this year, I’ve returned to Veracruz and I’m happily living in Xalapa.

When did you study at SFPC?

NN: I took [The] Musical Web in the summer of 2024 with instructors Tommy Martinez and Maxine de las Pozas. It was an amazing creative journey!

How would you describe your work or practice?

NN: My work explores the politics of pleasure, joy, radical imagination, parties, and rituals—using art, bodies, and technology as media for liberation. I often work with fiction, glitch, play, and eroticism, creating experiences that merge personal and collective narratives.

Community is central to my practice. I am drawn to social movements and committed to erotic and economic justice for women and diverse communities. I ask: Who has the right to enjoy life? Who has time, resources, and space to experience pleasure? How do we make it accessible to everybody and how can we push the boundaries of our imagination to envision new and more liberating pleasures?

Through my projects, imagination, play, sound, technology, and the body weave together to question and hack our social realities, opening horizons where more inclusive worlds can emerge. For years, I have generated spaces for reflection and learning with women and diverse communities, placing pleasure, care, and communal consciousness at the center. Working with sensitive communities fascinates me because it challenges me to imagine ways of doing things beyond the norms imposed by capitalist systems.

For example, in my upcoming project “Concierto para dormir la siesta” (A Concert for Taking a Nap), I use technology as a medium to regulate our nervous systems and rest collectively. Light, sound, and atmosphere guide participants into states of excitement or relaxation—creating a shared pause as a subtle act of resistance against accelerated capitalist rhythms.

I often share a phrase that guides my work: “When we perform utopia, the body keeps memory of it.” I see my artistic footprint as the creation of utopias—each one increasingly real—impacting bodies and lives positively. My fiction and collective work spill into reality, shaping more joyful, diverse, and free worlds.

Having accompanied social movements across Latin America for years, I also spent two years with the Colombian transfeminist organization Mujeres Al Borde, researching pedagogies of care and healing for women and LGBTQ+ communities, and mapping feminist healing houses across the continent. This process made me realize that it is not enough to denounce injustice and fight to exhaustion; we also need to build bridges, create strategies, and foster practices of care and healing. Only then can movements sustain themselves.

Over time, this conversation expanded beyond how bodies heal to how territories heal—I no longer know where the body begins and the territory ends; they are linked through the navel. Once, in a class, the Mayan linguist Fidencio Briceño shared that the word “ixi’im” means “corn.” But “ix” can also mean “I,” “we,” or even “the universe,” depending on its use. In Mayan, there is no separation between oneself and the universe. For me, this ancestral indigenous knowledge is a super poetic technology that reshapes how we approach the world.

At the core, I am deeply interested in exploring personal freedom—I want to know how free I can be, and I use technology as a tool to expand that horizon. Everything I create balances personal freedom with collective impact, exploring how far we can push imagination, self-knowledge, and transformation. Maybe I’m just hacking myself into freedom!

Can you share about a project you made while studying at SFPC?

NN: It was during The Musical Web course that I began developing TECNO-COATZA, the project that later earned me the FONCA: Jóvenes Creadores grant in the category “Composition of Acoustic, Electroacoustic, and Electronic Media.” Coatzacoalcos, my hometown, is a magical yet somewhat forgotten city in southern Mexico. In recent years, it has experienced profound violence¹ , leaving gaps not only in its artistic and cultural production but also in its historical and sonic memory. It is also a key reference of Olmec culture: according to tradition, it was along the Coatzacoalcos River that Quetzalcóatl, deity of life, knowledge, and civilization, was last seen.

At the beginning of 2024, I was reflecting on having spent 15 years away from this territory. I felt, in a very “Gloria Anzaldúan” way, on a strange border—grieving the loss of my home, my accent, my social network, while also processing how bodies and communities survive and heal from the violence Coatzacoalcos has endured. Taking classes at SFPC allowed me to explore, poetically and creatively, how technology could expand the terrain of imagination—to use it, break it, and play with it.

TECNO-COATZA is a sonic fiction and technoshamanic experiment that fuses the past, present, and future of the city through artificial intelligence, ritual, sound compositions, and ancestral wisdom. The compositions blend traditional Veracruz music with generative and AI-based processes, reflecting on the volatility of memory, the fiction of recollection, and the instability of the future. The project imagines how the city could be reconstructed using technology, sound, spirituality, and the wisdom of the Olmec culture. It will result in seven immersive sound pieces narrating Coatzacoalcos’ history, alongside a website documenting the research, sonic landscapes, rituals, and interviews.

TECNO-COATZA explores how technology and spirituality can coexist to heal, reimagine, and transform territories, and I hope this exploration and conversation extends beyond my city to other communities and bodies affected by violence—from Coatzacoalcos to Gaza, from Colombia, Peru, Argentina, and countless other territories in the Global South marked by colonial violence.

What are some other projects you have worked on before or after your time at SFPC?

NN: Ups, maybe a bit more than two. I recently released the single XTR on the futurist New York label WATF! as part of the cyberfeminist sonic compilation GLITCHES B1TCHES. While touring, I facilitated a worktable with the Music Department of the Ministry of Culture of Yucatán to develop proposals aimed at creating better cultural and educational programs for women and LGBTQ+ communities in the independent music scene.

I also launched a DJ set featuring women and LGBTQ+ sonic artists with Subtle Radio on Senaida’s program Zeros+Ones—thank you, Senaida, I admire you immensely!

But most of my year has been consumed by TECNO-COATZA. It will finally premiere on my birthday this December, marking an important chapter in both my creative and personal journey—I’m beyond excited!

How do you define poetic computation?

NN: A sweet way to glitch into freedom!

What is a meaningful fact, lesson, or something else that you learned at SFPC? Does it impact your work today? If so, how?

NN: SFPC taught me to reimagine how we use technology, seeing it as an extension of our creativity and a playground for experimentation and play. It changed my approach to technology forever!

Who is an artist, scholar, political organizer, scientist or leader who inspires you?

NN: Omg, I could name so many. But staying in the music field, Octo Octa inspires me deeply. She comes from community-driven environments, makes information accessible, and is never afraid to generously share her knowledge and experience. Also—she’s an amazing artist! For me, she represents fabulosity and imagination turned into life goals: a life in the woods with her partner, making music, sharing knowledge, living chill, beautiful and radiant.

I also love how she names herself: “15 years of being an amateur, never an expert.” For me, she is absolutely an expert, but I admire the humility and openness in that statement—reminding us that learning is continuous, and that creativity doesn’t require expensive gear or elitist attitudes. Her guides on live sets and DJing impacted me profoundly.

From my Latin American reality, I am grateful for artists who don’t impose one way of doing things as the way. I value how conscious she is of the limitations many of us face, and how she makes her knowledge accessible. Maybe I see myself reflected there: with my students I always say, “be pro-piracy.” Steal, hack, destroy, take, modify—because in our Latin American contexts, ways of doing things are different, especially when it comes to technology and resources.

I find it vital to have representations of women and trans people living fabulous, joyful, creative lives full of talent and generosity. Octo Octa embodies that possibility.

Is there anything else you would like to share?

NN: Thank you so much to Sara and everyone at SFPC for staying in touch and inviting me to this interview! <3

Follow NINA NINA’s work through TikTok, Instagram, and her website.