Civic Arts Series: Marisa Moran Jahn
b'Marisa Mor\\xe1n Jahn is a multi-media artist, writer, educator and activist, whose colorful, often humorous uses of personae and media create imaginative pathways to civic awareness of urgent public issues. Working collaboratively, her projects include a classic American road trip, CareForce One, in a 50-year-old station wagon, advocating issues concerning care workers that became a PBS film series; and Bibliobandido, a story-telling initiative for Honduran children featuring a masked bandit who devours stories. Jahn, winner of numerous awards, is co-founder of Studio REV-, a non-profit organization of artists, technologists, media makers, low-wage workers, immigrants and teens who producing creative media and public art about the issues they face.\\n\\nShe will be sharing Snatch-ural History of Copper (working title), an art project, book, and feature-length film initiated by artist Marisa Mor\\xe1n Jahn that investigates copper, an element found in electrical wires, computers, lightning rods, and the IUD (intrauterine device) implanted in Jahn\\u2019s own \\u2018snatch\\u2019 (womb). Jahn interviews a range of experts in search of otherworldly answers that trammel the boundaries of myth, literary studies, science, alchemy and political controversy. Interviewing scientists in Saint Petersburg Florida who use rockets outfitted with a copper nose to trigger (and capture) lightning, Jahn asks, \\u201cDo you think that when the lightning goes off I\\u2019ll feel it in my cooch?\\u201d She visits a shrine on the island of Cyprus, home of the earliest copper mines dating to 8700 BCE as well as the pre-Christian god, Venus of Aphrodite who share the same symbol (\\u2640) most familiar to us today as the symbol for women, females, and a movement for women\\u2019s liberation. Throughout these real-world investigations, Jahn seeks access to the top of a building and solder her copper IUD on top of a copper lightning rod, raising its height by an imperceptible inch. \\u201cI can\\u2019t wait for the moment when a bolt of lightning hits this thing \\u2014 just imagine my little IUD radiating. It might even be sizzled into a thousand little parts distributed and distended into the atmosphere.\\u201d Poetically and playfully weaving the issues into a new cosmology, the film touches upon timely issues such as planetary sustainability, labor, and reproductive self-determination during a moment when both sides of the spectrum mount all-offensive campaigns.\\n\\nAlso featuring\\u2026Sasha Costanza-Chock, Jane M. Sak, and Steve Seidel.'