Last summer, I joined the Data Justice Hub. I did not know much about data activism. Still, with a hunch that we could find something exciting and powerful to explore, I proposed focusing on the Latin American-led initiative Hilando Futuros. Hilando Futuros is a speculative project created by Ana Sofia Ruiz earlier this year and supported by, among other organizations, the Latin American Initiative for Open Data (ILDA, for its Spanish acronym). The idea was to gather data and textile activists to imagine Latin America’s futures in 2050 and then embroider them. The initiative, carried out simultaneously in five countries, included organizations dealing purely with data and organizations that use embroidery as activism media. I started this research by asking myself: why are data activists in Latin America turning to embroidery? After participating in one of their webinars and having an initial conversation with Ana Sofia, I found that these data activists do not use embroidery as protest or social denunciation artifacts (e.g., Andra et al. 2020; Rosentreter 2020). Instead, I discovered that by encountering the materiality of data through embroidery, these activists were engaging in sense-making exercises and promoting “ethics of care” (Puig 2011). Over the summer of 2022, I interviewed five fantastic women practicing data textile activism on Zoom. They all worked together as a collective but had spaces in their countries with specific agendas and approaches to data and embroidery. By interviewing them, my view on data wholly changed. Hilando Futuros showed me how data could be deconstructed but also re-imagined. It showed me how data could be visceral, personal, and situated, and its representation can take the most “unusual” forms. On Hilando Futuros as SF From the very beginning, I found Hilando Futuros intriguing. It made me think about what Donna Haraway calls SF. For the author, “SF is a sign for science fiction, speculative feminism, science fantasy, speculative fabulation, science fact, and also, string figures” (2016, p. 10). As I got to know the collective and tried to follow their journey, I saw the SF manifesting itself. Hilando Futuros is a collective composed of six women working for five organizations across Latin America. Together they set to create a Speculative Fabulation about Latin America in 2050, told in different voices through textiles. Ana Sofia, from Costa Rica, is a psychologist with more than ten years of experience working on the intersection between data and development. She described how Hilando Futuros came to be and how at the beginning, she just wanted to combine her passions for textiles and futures thinking to see what would happen. Most of all, she longed to find meaning in a job that heavily relies on raw numbers and digital worlds. Virginia from Uruguay is a textile artist and researcher with a background in communications. Some years ago, she founded Nuevo Reino, where she teaches textiles and pursues her research agenda to deconstruct the myths associated with embroidery as a domestic endeavor. She recounted how textile as a language had prompted her to explore many social issues, to the point she got to thinking about data, something she would have never imagined when she got started. Vero from Colombia is an anthropologist who has worked on the intersection between data and culture at Datasketch over the last few years. She explained how, contrary to the rest of the collective, she and her colleague Edda had just learned to embroider to take part in Hilando Futuros. Flavia, who is Brazilian, but lives in Spain, is also a psychologist and the mind –and hands– behind the initiative Bordar os Sonhos. Her professional voyage working with communities has also been a journey to reconcile her feminism with her passion for embroidery. As Virginia, she also intends to deconstruct the myths that associate embroidery with a patriarchal idea of womanhood. Finally, Daniela from Mexico is a historian, embroiderer, and adult educator. She ended up working with data almost accidentally when she applied for a job at a digital rights organization. While she did not get the job, the organization saw her potential and helped her to start her own data activism platform. Through her organization, Agujas Combativas, she promotes needlework as an activist tool to rethink care and precarity and propose more liveable worlds. As I got to know the collective, I started to see Hilando Futuros as a String Figuration built with knots of data and knots of attention. On more than one occasion during our collaboration, Ana Sofia took out her copy of Byung-Chul Han‘s The Disappearance of Rituals. She told us how reading it, she realized she needed to find ways to cope with the loss of meaning in the highly accelerated world of data. So, she proposed Hilando Futuros as an exercise to slow down and imagine alternative futures that would help her to stay grounded. As she explained while she showed me her needlework on Zoom: “I’m always carrying thread. And I’m always knitting or doing something with my hands because it helps me think; it helps me breathe into my thoughts and the world’s noise. There are a lot of issues that are competing for our attention. And there is a lot of rush in trying to either have answers or bring solutions.” Soon enough, I could identify its Science Fiction (and cyborg) elements. Vero recounted how they organized a lecture on futurology and prospection before they started their project. She narrated how as a result, their embroidery pieces tended to focus on dystopian futures marked by environmental crises, pandemics and other forms of destruction. However, they somehow found hope by sharing this experience. While she was the only one who mentioned dystopia futures, they all explained how these spaces to imagine together led them to propose hopeful counternarratives of Latin America in 2050. This counternarrative is not linear or homogenous but occurs in different times and spaces. It also has a different focus: some groups decided to think about migration, and others about work and precarity. Some created da(r)tafacts –as Renold (2017) call the art pieces that emerge from data co-creation encounters– in the form of flags about the work conditions they wanted; others embroidered a big collective piece that portrays the future of migration they wanted to see. While this counternarrative seeks to challenge the reliance on digital infrastructures, digital infrastructures also made it possible. Flavia, for instance, described how she started different collectives working simultaneously in Brazil and with Latin people living in Europe. She conveyed how the project helped them make sense of the temporality of their current experiences and how they still connected through three different Whatsapp groups. Digging deep down, I could start to sense Hilando Futuros’s Speculative (Data) Feminism endeavours (see D’Ignazio and Klein 2020). The project promotes situated knowledges (Haraway, 1988) by recognizing textile activisms’ epistemological and speculative power (see Sánchez-Aldana et al., 2019). The situatedness of the data produced in each embroidery encounter reveals the value of multiple forms of knowledge, including the knowledge that comes from “people as living, feeling bodies in the world” (Data Feminism Principle #3). Virginia, for instance, recounted how she promoted encounters around an embroidery table she had designed for other projects based on how embroidery was initially practiced. She explained how the shape of the table where human bodies gather to work on a joint project allowed them to have meaningful conversations about the future of migration that could not have happened otherwise. Finally, by challenging Science Facts, I could see how Hilando Futuros, as a data feminism project speaks directly to power (Data Feminism Principle #1). While some of the organizations that are part of the collective advocate for better and open data from governments and other powerful institutions, in this case, instead of waiting to get official numbers (“the view from nowhere,” as Haraway (1988) puts it), or accepting them at face value, they created them. One evocative case was Daniela’s focus on work conditions: “I don’t know how I’m gonna pay my rent. So how can I think about the future?” she told us when asked about the issues she decided to focus on. Daniela narrated how she and the group she gathered in Mexico City used complaint as a methodology to engage with work precarity but also to show that their –many times invisible– work matters (Data Feminism Principle #7). By embroidery flags, activists and artists showcased that work could be otherwise: more relational, more careful, and more recognized. By advocating for different work conditions and realities, they showed how data is situated, but also it is visceral (D’Ignazio and Klein 2020): “…for me, it was a really vulnerable project because it’s a topic that hurts me because I like it’s like really near to my skin. It was not, like, so enjoyable. But I think it was like necessary to go through it”. Becoming datakin In our last interview, Ana Sofia told me she did not know what would come out when she started the project. But she wanted to try it anyway because she felt something powerful could come out of these exchanges: “It was my idea to do something that I really didn’t know what it was and how it would look like. So, I think this was my intention of not knowing where it would take me or us. But I wanted to see if we bring all these ingredients together, all these threads together, how we can weave it so that it will have a symbol”. The more I talked to her and the members of the collective, I confirmed my initial hunch: Hilando Futuros is a kind of SF. As Donna Haraway (2016) puts it: Playing games of string figures is about giving and receiving patterns, dropping threads and failing but sometimes finding something that works, something consequential and maybe even beautiful, that wasn’t there before, relaying connections that matter, of telling stories in hand upon hand, digit upon digit, attachment site upon attachment site, to craft conditions for finite flourishing on terra, on earth (p.10). It astonishes me how I see Hilando Futuros every time I read the passage above. I see the collective in the patterns, the threads, the work with hands, and the work with digits. I see them remixing their data and not shying away from the possibility of failing but also finding things that work. And while doing so, they produced beautiful items, such as their embroidery pieces, WhatsApp groups, and collectivity. Reading Hilando Futuros as SF, I now realize that the pieces (or da(r)tafacts) the different collectives created could not have occurred in isolation: they needed “datakin.” Inspired by Haraway’s (2016) call to “making kin,” Alyssa Niccolini and her colleagues suggest that “making datakin consists of reworking and remixing our data through successive waves of engagement to create collective and more-than-human researcher identities or assemblages” (p. 326). By talking with the different members of the collective, I could observe firsthand how this kinship-making happened through what Perez-Bustos et al. (2019) refer to as “the affective importance of collective encounters in political textile action” (p. 369). By embroidering together, the members of Hilando Futuros not only created da(r)tfacts about the futures they want. But by fostering an ethos of care, slowing down and prioritizing the affective within the data activism community in Latin America, they taught us how to become datakin.   References: Andrä, Christine, Berit Bliesemann de Guevara, Lydia Cole, and Danielle House. 2020. “Knowing Through Needlework: Curating the Difficult Knowledge of Conflict Textiles.” Critical Military Studies 6 (3–4): 341–59. D’Ignazio, Catherine, and Lauren F. Klein. 2020. Data Feminism. Cambridge: MIT Press. Haraway, Donna. 1988. “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective.” Feminist Studies 14 (3): 575–99. ———. 2016. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. London and Durham: Duke University Press. Niccolini, Alyssa D., Shiva Zarabadi, and Jessica Ringrose. 2018. “Spinning Yarns: Affective Kinshipping as Posthuman Pedagogy.” Parallax 24 (3): 324–43. Pérez-Bustos, Tania, Eliana Sánchez-Aldana, and Alexandra Chocontá-Piraquive. 2019. “Textile Material Metaphors to Describe Feminist Textile Activisms: From Threading Yarn, to Knitting, to Weaving Politics.” TEXTILE 17 (4): 368–77. Puig de la Bellacasa, Maria. 2011. “Matters of Care in Technoscience: Assembling Neglected Things.” Social Studies of Science 41 (1): 85–106. Renold, Emma. 2018. “‘Feel What I Feel’: Making Da(r)Ta with Teen Girls for Creative Activisms on How Sexual Violence Matters.” Journal of Gender Studies 27 (1): 37–55. Rosentreter, Karen. 2020. “Puntadas Revoltosas.” Museo de las Mujeres Costa Rica. July 23, 2020. Sánchez-Aldana, Eliana, Tania Pérez-Bustos, and Alexandra Chocontá-Piraquive. 2019. “¿Qué son los activismos textiles?: Una mirada desde los estudios feministas a catorce casos bogotanos.” Athenea Digital. Revista de Pensamiento e Investigación Social 19 (3): 1–24.