Mecha Cooperative

Born in 1984, Carlos Zerpa (Mecha Cooperative) is a screenwriter, creative producer, director and street artist based in Caracas, Venezuela. His creative practice emerges at the intersection of storytelling, visual arts, and social justice in South America and the Caribbean. His work seeks to empower underrepresented characters by creating transgressive, engaging, and irreverent stories.

In 2010 he co-founded the cooperative ECL-MECHA (www.mecha.pro), a team with who he has co-created several award-winning street arts, editorial, and animation projects such as the series A Piece of Peace (www.pieceofpeace.co), Karetabla (www.karetabla.com) and FILO, the transmedia storytelling CHAMBA (2018), the books Mural y Luces (2012) and Alerta que Salpica (2015), the magazine PLoMO (2011-2014), the film essay Beyond the Mine (2015) and the animated documentary series Voices for Peace, Colombia (2017), among others. As a street artist, he has designed and painted dozens of statements on the walls of Venezuela, Colombia, Brazil, Ecuador, Cuba, Spain, and Argentina.

- Co-Founder of RIMA (rima.network), a digital platform aimed to bring closer artists from the Global South with opportunities for international mobility and financing.

- Co-founder and teacher in ENGRAPO, an independent public education project that introduces youth to visual communication as a tool to understand and transform their reality.

- Alumni of Berlinale Talents (Germany, 2022), the Global Cultural Relationships Platform (2021), IsLab (Puerto Rico, 2020), Sundance Collab (USA, 2020), Bridging the Gap (Spain, 2019) and winner of ApaLab Pitch competition (Argentina, 2019). Fellow of the artist residencies pIAR (Ghana, 2023), Saari (Finland, 2022), Villa Strauli (Switzerland, 2022), La Maison des Auteurs (France, 2022), and Sacatar (Brazil, 2021).