Salon Femmes br@nchées #51- Theme : DIY media

at Studio XX - Open to the Public
Studio XX is pleased to announce its participation in the Journées de la Culture 2003 with an Open House. Situated around this year’s annual theme of DIY – Do it Yourself – the Studio will offer an evening and afternoon of activities – an open jam session, presentations and micro-broadcasting. Visitors will be able to meet and speak with artists and musicians about issues dealing with women and technology. They will also be able to consult works on-line and find out information regarding the Studio’s various activities including workshops, open lab, residencies, co-productions and programming.
Guests include Fatoumata Kandé-Senghor – Director of the Waru Studio (Senegal), Ubermatic.org (Amanda Ramos + Michelle Teran) and MXXR – a group of women musicians working in electronic music.
Theme
DIY Media - electronic and artisanal, integrates old and new media and raises the question of appropriate technologies. Even if we are confronted with broadcast instabilities, distributed practices and data retention linked to hardware, bandwiths and their respective incoherencies, it is necessary to place responsability in the hands of each person. As such, we may witness ingenious imaginaries, pragmatic propensities that take innovative forms in counter-networks, generative art and free software initiatives with regards to the Web, to name but a few.
The evocation of the theme not only predisposes us to explicit autonomous practices, a reference to action and a self-sufficiency, but also towards technological responsibility - to consciously develop choices that can be made regarding artistic approaches which often have larger cultural and socio-political implications.
Friday, September 26th - Searching for Modern Africa
Fatoumata Kandé-Senghor + Waru Studio (Senegal)
“I am searching for modern AFRICA…Modern Africa rises through its women, because they are the source of birth, know how and education in Africa. I am searching for modernity in its own expression, away from what seems to be THE NORM, the norm of the Global village. We have time NOW to think our modernity. Modernity is a natural flow that cannot be organised and captured in any rules. Each human being has to learn something from someone, somewhere because it is convincing enough, obvious enough, emotional enough to be added to ones habits and way of thinking”.
Fatoumata Kandé-Senghor will introduce Waru Studio, its activities and future research fields.
Born in 1971 in Dakar, Fatou Kandé-Senghor is a film director, photographer and costume designer. She co-founded a platform of dialogue for filmmakers of her generation to explore new technologies as an alternative to the dying film industry and a voice to the peoples of the rich and misunderstood continent : Africa. She has written in numerous publications about the African experience in film and about gender issues in the African context.
Saturday, September 27th : _Flatlandia – Ubermatic.org
(Amanda Ramos + Michelle Teran - Presentation by Amanda Ramos)
Flatlandia is a database, gameboard and series of installations that link together the properties of images with the properties of spaces. For three intensive weeks Michelle Teran (based at Bootlab in Berlin) and Amanda Ramos (based at Studio XX in Montreal) engaged in a dialogue about the role of the image vs. the role of space in the city. Armed with still and video cameras they documented instances where image and space slipped into each other’s domain – situations in which image acted more like space and space acted more like image.
Amanda and Michelle accumulated hundreds of examples and arranged this documentation into common typologies so that typical scenarios would become evident. Through e-mail, chats, and the website, they maintained a constant dialogue about what we were finding, what is interesting in the photographs and shared their impressions/inspirations from the imagery.Amanda Ramos is an installation artist and exhibition designer who focuses on creating environments that integrate architecture and media. Working always in collaboration, she develops interventions that create public space and explores the methods of occupation within them. Her work involves urban graphics, interface installations, social play, material and image research.
Michelle Teran uses live media in performances and installations that address issues such as social networks, intimacy over distance, presence and the interplay between (media) spaces. She uses video from [public] webcams, streams, wireless cameras in live situations and likes to work with every day ephemeral materials and public spaces. She is interested in the slippery junctions where spaces converge, in the dialogue between physical, virtual and middle spaces. Her work covers live installations, online performances, telepresence, live art and video.
MXXR
Anna Friz, DJ Cyan, Jackie Gallant, Bernadette Houde, Isabelle Lussier, Brenda Schiuma, Oana Spinu and Nancy Tobin.
MXXR represents a group of women musicians in electronic music, sound and noise who have come together to skill-share and make music. Resolutely DIY, their polemic stance contests the dominance of men in the electronic music industry. They recently presented a live stream to radiostadt 1, a temporary independent radio station in Dresden, Germany. They will host an informal and live jam for the Studio’s Open House.