pamela varela
pamela varela (MX, 1995) is a multifaceted artivist exploring poetic-political forms of movement, language, sexuality, mysticism, and research as expressive devices to reappropriate the body. She creates transdisciplinary performances mixing diverse media: video, sound, installation, electronics, bio art, words, body-based practices, among others, while using technology to extend the senses, enhance connection, and cross bodily boundaries. She is a Latin American woman who has been developing her artistic practice in Europe, which encourages her to place her creation within the symbiosis of both cultures and explore feminist and decolonial deconstructions of knowledge production and artmaking. Alongside Ines DeRu and ella hebendanz, she co-founded sWitches in 2019, a cyberfeminist collective reclaiming the witch as the wise rebel to hack the technoscientific field through art.
pamela studied architecture for two years in the Polytechnic University of Catalonia and graduated in 2021 from the Bachelor Interactive/Media/Design at the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague. Her individual graduation project together with the collective one of sWitches were nominated for the department's prize, and her personal thesis was nominated for the academy-wide bachelor thesis award, receiving an honorable mention. She published an excerpt from it at the Politics of the Machines Conference in 2021. In 2022, sWitches received the Digital Culture Grant from the Stimuleringsfonds (NL) to develop a technological system to create cyberperformances, a project that was presented in 2024 at the Mesh Festival Conference in Basel. In 2023, pamela and ella won the Bio Art & Design Award together with Joris Koene, a scientist from the Free University of Amsterdam, which allowed them to conduct an artistic-scientific research on the colonial history of the female body in relation to that of Latin America: "re-c(O)unting". The continuation of this work is currently being supported by the Stimuleringsfonds, as well as another upcoming project in collaboration with Marlot Meyer: "Venus Affect", which looks into the relation between audience and performer through technological mediation in performance art. In 2025, pamela graduated from the performative practices master’s degree Live Art Forms at the Academy of Fine Arts Nuremberg. Her work has been shown in several art centers in Europe and Latin America, and she lives between the two continents.
