Cherchez La Femme, SPACE

Cherchez La Femme at SPACE, Hackney, showcases the work of radical feminist video collectives working at the genesis of portable filming. 

It was back in 1967, the Sony Portapak became the first portable, battery operated video camera to hit the consumer market. The subsequent growth of relatively cheap personal video cameras allowed for media production to become decentralised. Access to the means of producing video was suddenly expanded to a greater number of people, as video technology became commercially viable as a mass manufactured product. At last images could easily be created and shared locally, rather than received solely as a broadcast from a media institutions, or as film in the cinema. 

Activists in particular took advantage of the opportunity to produce films that could effectively bring their views to a much wider audience. Cherchez la Femme, at SPACE  in Hackney, brings several films made on such cameras from the Centre Audiovisuel Simone de Beauvoir to London for the first time. 

These films, made by French feminist collectives in the 1970s, show an optimistic vision of how technology can create fertile spaces for the production of ideas. As TVs steadily became ubiquitous in the home, the potential for communities to make and broadcast their own television was near to becoming a reality. Radical Software, a journal for emerging technologies, called it the “alternate television movement”. As we know, television was not so easily wrested from state and commercial control, and then the Internet came along… But still, there is much to be learned and enjoyed from this brief period of technological optimism. 

As feminism rises again into the mainstream through new forms of digital media, this show will provide a thought provoking parallel (or perhaps a contrast?) to out own twitter-fuelled times and the ongoing relationship between technology, art and activism.