Tuesday, May 7, 2013
Diana McCarty - Agent of Cultural Provocation. She was was born and raised in New Mexico and has lived in Europe since 1993 - Budapest in 90's and Berlin in the 2000s. Her work revolves around art, politics and new/old media. Currently, she works with radio, gender and revolutionary women and film practices. She is an editor and co-founder of the award winning artist run radio reboot.fm in Berlin, a co-founder of the international radio art network, radia.fm and a co-moderator of the faces on-line community for women, art and technology (with Kathy Rae Huffman, Valie Djordjevic, Ushi Reiter).
Past projects include Prologue: New Feminism, New Europe, with plans for future implementaitons. A long time ago, McCarty was part of the International Women’s University server development team, (with Seda Gürses, Barbara Schelkle, Prof. Heidi Schelhowe, and Heiki Pisch) - and also worked to develop feminist pedagogical approaches to learning technology. In the mid-nineties, she co-founded the Nettime (with Geert Lovink, Pit Schultz) and as part of the Media Research Foundation, co-organized the MetaForum Conference Series in Budapest (with Janos Sugar and Geert Lovink). She was a co-founder of Mikro e.V. and the now defunct cultural hacker space, bootlab, in Berlin. McCarty works with artists, occasionally writes about their work and has co-edited the Nettime Medien Zentral Kommittee readers. Her main interests are exploiting social and technological systems for culture and real life.
Diana's residency in Tbilisi was spent researching present, past and future feminist and women activists in Georgia, sharing related films and looking for partners for future projects that relate to all of this.
While her stay in tbilisi, GeoAIR, Women's Fund in Georgia and "Identoba" organized a movie night on May 13 at Identoba office, where the screening of two films were followed by the discussion with Diana. Collected money was fully used for the grant budget of Women's Fund.
Following films were screened:
Born in Flames ( Lizzie Borden, USA, 1983) - a documentary-style feminist science fiction film that explores racism, classism, sexism and heterosexism in an alternative United States socialist democracy.
Conakry (Filipa César with Grada Kilomba & Diana McCarty, 2012) 10 min. (World Premiere!) "Luta Ca Caba Inda" (Creole T. The Struggle Is Not Over Yet), is an homage to the African Liberation Movement and Amilcar Cabral. “Conakry” is a 16 MM film that travels through time, space and media to revisit the political landscape of Guinea Bissau. Staged at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin and based on 70s archival images of Flora Gomes, Sana na N’Hada, Josefina Crato and José Cobumba Bolama, the film layers fictional media accounts of the archive, subjective readings of the images, and questions their role post-African liberation. It describes and exposes how accessing almost forgotten footage of militant imaginary can be an instrument for recovering memory.
Diana McCarty thanks to the Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen (ifa) in Germany for their kind support of travel and costs, and the GeoAIR residency program for hosting her.
