Sursiendo
"We are a small organization of eager and committed people, currently living in Chiapas, Mexico. Sursiendo was founded in May 2011 at the intersection of activism, alternative media and design, free software and culture, grassroots education, art and cultural management. Through our experience in community media, we’ve engaged in human and land rights movements. We hold and share different perspectives on commonality based on these different ways of doing activism. In 2015, we become a civil association.
We want to contribute to social change by defending digital communality, collective digital rights and hackfeminisms, through equitable and creative participation, where gender perspective is at the core, and grassroots education and free software are our stepping stones.
Our main topic of reflection focuses on the idea of the internet as a free social space that facilitates and enables the vast amount of activities that we carry out in our day-to-day. The digital environment has become an extension of our ‘physical’ lives through which we meet, discuss, learn, socialize, and inform. These tools have an undeniable positive aspect and yet we see the internet as a ‘territory’ that must be defended.
Nowadays, internet is in the hands of a few corporations that impose monocultures of data bytes and information extractivism. Our work contributes to the discussion on human rights in the digital realm and aims to create small nodes of digital autonomy that enable us, step by step, to gain control of our connected lives and rewrite technologies according to our traditions, concerns and needs.
We work mainly at a regional level with groups and organizations from the Southeast of Mexico. Our situated approach bridges local human rights advocacy with global discussions in the digital realm.
Sursiendo, linking theory and practice to help [re]construct the social fabric from the lens of the South… We are a gerund, in permanent construction, in movement.
We come from different worlds: we participate in community centres, we study cultural management, we contribute to free knowledge; we’re part of grassroots communication initiatives, environmental organizations and social movements; we use and promote free software and put into practice social design. We come from urban activism and got involved with social research on the way. We convey and communicate through multimedia and writing." (2025)
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