Museum of Impossible Forms is delighted to begin a collaboration with RED FOREST for a series of lectures, conversations and screenings during 2021 -2022. The first event centers on the work of media activist and filmmaker Diana McCarty and Filipa César.
Diana McCarty and Filipa César began to share a collective practice in 2011 with the project “Luta ca caba inda” (The struggle is not over yet), which concerns the importance of archives for the collective memory of the war of independence in Guinea-Bissau.
Luta ca caba inda is both an ongoing project and a loose knit collective. It takes its name from a never accomplished film conceived as a post-independence documentary in Guinea-Bissau and translates as the struggle is not over yet. The film was abandoned in 1980 during the Coup D’Etat that interrupted the revolutionary project of nation building imagined by Amílcar Cabral. The collaborative project began in 2011 when Sana N’Hada and Filipa César among others worked closely to research and reactivate the imaginary of the Guinean liberation movement. Departing from the digitalisation of the film remains of these national militant cinema productions, it developed into a collective, experimental archival project. Luta ca caba inda became a magnetic field, gathering transnational cinephiles and other militants together through various events, screenings, mobile cinemas, publications and seminars. It is a testimony to the present and to a decade of collective and internationally connected cinema praxis in the country that started in 1963, when four young militants, Sana na N’Hada, Flora Gomes, Josefina Crato and José Bolama were sent to Cuba to learn cinema and returned to produce national militant cinema in Guinea-Bissau. Luta ca caba inda is also an environment for decolonization with forces that connect people and causes from then and an unknown when, and nurtures ecologies of relation that started many centuries ago and have no finitude on the horizon.
The cross-genre work, which has been ongoing for 10 years, has produced digital archives, short films, podcasts, and public events. Including the publication “Luta ca caba inda: time place matter voice” and the essay film “Spell Reel,” which won several awards and was screened at Moma, New York, the Berlinale in 2017, among others. Their latest film “Quantum Creole” also screened at the Berlinale. In their interdisciplinary projects, César and McCarty show how their research goes beyond film production, is taken up by other means, and has an impact on current cultural and political debates.
This presentation has the kind support of the Goethe-Institut Finnland.
About the artists:
Diana McCarty is an Independent media producer and feminist media activist, and founding editor of reboot.fm, the award winning free artists’ radio in Berlin. She is a co-founder of the radio networks, radia.fm and 24/3 FM Berlin; of the FACES (faces-I) online community for women; and of the elsehere association. In 2020, she co-curated “Latitude on Air—Unsettling Power Relations”, the Goethe Institut radio festival that was broadcast in Berlin. She co-initiated the exhibition “Nervous Systems:Quantified Life and the Social Question”, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, 2016, Berlin. McCarty actively collaborates with the experimental media project “Luta ca caba inda”. As a cyberpunk in the 1990s, McCarty was active in independent internet culture with net-art, nettime, the MetaForum Conference Series, and different hacking spaces. Her work revolves around art, gender, politics, radical feminism, technology, and media. She is a proud Chicana from Albuquerque. McCartyis Professor of Film and Video at Merz Academy and a KONE Research Fellow 2021. She lives and works in Berlin.
Filipa César is an artist and filmmaker interested in the fictional aspects of the documentary film and the politics and poetics inherent to moving image. Since 2011, César has been looking into the imaginaries of the Guinea-Bissau’s Liberation Movement and its cognitive potencies, developing that research into the ongoing collective project “Luta ca caba inda”. The resulting body of work comprises 16 mm films, digital archives, videos, seminars, screenings, publications, ongoing collaborations with artists, theorists and activists. César’s genre bending work bridges contemporary and historical discourses in her film and video work, as well as in her writing and publications. She is particularly interested in militant cinema and the political dimension of the moving image and the technologies used. She co-founded the Mediateca Onshore, an archival project and a place of learning with ancestors, nature and people in Guinea Bissau. She is Professor of Film and Video at Merz Academy. César lives and works in Berlin.
About RED FOREST
RED FOREST is a collective that grounds together research, art, political imagination, and social actions thriving for transformative justice and ecological reparations. In 2021 they initiated a pan-continental research focusing on the intersections between contemporary extractivism and datification processes. Red Forest assembles and organises their work with infrastructures of collective reciprocity and interdependency as actual potentiality. Their research contributes to the theoretical framework of Energetic Materialism to conceptualise urgent cultural and social processes in the defence of life and the construction of pluriversal futures in dignified flux. Red Forest is mobilized by David Muñoz Alcántara, Diana McCarty, Mijke van der Drift and Oleksiy Radynski, after their collective practices collided during a 2019-2020 BAK Fellowship in Utrecht. It unfolds as a growing constellation of artists, activists, researchers, media producers, filmmakers, philosophers, educators and time travellers realizing interdisciplinary projects.
Red Forest current research project Energetic Materialism Laboratory is done with the support of the Kone Foundation.
