Antonio Macotela was born in Mexico City in 1980. His father was a mathematician and a poet while his mother was a doctor, and his most significant inspiration.
He studied at Escuela Nacional de Artes Plasticas (ENAP) in Mexico City. After three semesters of study, he decided to create an alternative academic endeavour with some of his peers which they entitled Medios Múltiples. Their primary goal was to generate a space that rejected traditional art teaching. It was during that period that Macotela began to work on his first multidisciplinary project Time Divisa, which was developed inside a prison and reflected on economy, time, and social change.
He has exhibited in many Mexican museums. His first international show occurred in 2009 at the Sao Paulo Biennial. That same year, he was accepted into the Rijksakademie Van Beeldende Kunsten, Amsterdam, and since then he has lived in various places. He has shown my work in the 14th Istanbul Biennial; the Second Triennial of the New Museum, New York; Manifesta 9, Genk, Belgium; Prospect 3, New Orleans; dOCUMENTA 14; and The Hammer Museum, Los Angeles.
For the past two years Macotela has worked with a group of hackers on the project The Ballad of the Q’aqchas, which he will continue as part of the Digital Earth Fellowship, 2020-2021.
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Antonio Macotela draws a parallel between the Q’aqchas - a group of pirate ore miners in the eighteenth century - and a group of contemporary hackers in Spain, with whom Macotela established a strong personal bond in 2017. By exploring the concept of a “hacker class”, Macotela asks whether the relationship between economic value and sacrifice, and the modes of production stemming from it, can be opposed. By looking at the transformation of planet earth into a giant super computer, Macotela investigates how specific agents can find loopholes in this planetary system of surveillance and control. Utilising the figure of the hacker, he explores narratives of resistance and strategies of subversion that undermine existing power structures of computation on a planetary scale.