Julie Perini: The Blog

Girl Next Door Sneak Peak from Julie Perini on Vimeo.

A new video to be released real, real soon.

Screensaver: Open Video Projects in Amidei
Screening includes: I am trying to learn the words to Josie Cotton’s “Johnny, Are You Queer?” and now you can, too. (2005, DV, 5 minutes)
Curated by Open Video Projects / Sarra Brill (Rome)
Premio Internazionale Sergio Amidei
Palazzo del Cinema
piazza della Vittoria 41
34170 Gorizia – Italy

Moved again.  Now near Mississippi Ave. in the Boise neighborhood of North Portland. Taking over a space previously occupied by the artist Alisha Wessler who makes lovely paintings and drawings and other multi-media things.

I am excited that filmmaker and installation artist Cauleen Smith, based in San Diego, and I are grooving on similar ideas about relational aesthetics and film production.  She found out about my Relational Filmmaking Manifesto and I am flattered that she re-posted the it on her blog.  I am inspired and motivated to finish an essay I’ve been working on that describes my ideas about relational filmmaking in more depth, and to get out there and make more relational media work.

Check out her projects!

Ideas and practices I’m encountering at the Social Forum this week remind me that I haven’t been all that public about this manifesto I wrote in the fall, to be published any day now in INCITE! Journal of Experimental Media & Radical Aesthetics. (Not to be confused with the awesome organization INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence based out of Redmond, WA.)  It has taken me several years to be able to articulate my creative process and beliefs about mediamaking the way I do below.  So enjoy it.

Relational Filmmaking:  A Manifesto

Relational filmmakers do not make films about people.
Relational filmmakers make films with people.

Relational filmmakers do not interview subjects.
Relational filmmakers have conversations with other people.

Relational filmmakers do not know what the final film will look like.
Relational filmmakers make formal decisions that address the aesthetic, ethical, technical, and personal problems encountered throughout the making of the film.

Relational filmmakers do not adhere to established modes or conventions.
Relational filmmakers make films that are abstract, factual, and fictional, all at once.

Relational filmmakers do not fuck around with these tools of representation and power.
Relational filmmakers use their tools to experiment with new ways of being and to emancipate new forms of subjectivity.

Relational filmmakers believe that reality is the consequence of what we do together.  Their films carry and conduct traces of this belief.  Relational films are co-created through careful and playful interrogations of the roles performed by the people and materials involved with the film’s production and reception:  artists, subjects, passers-by, audiences, environments, ideas, and things.

By Julie Perini
Edinboro, PA
September 2009

Research for the Revolution: Radical Research Strategies for Movement Building
Friday, June 25, 1:00pm – 5:30pm
Cobo Hall, D2-10

I am a facilitator for this exciting workshop organized by Team Colors and Midnight Notes:

“Research for the Revolution: Radical Research Strategies for Movement Building” will explore research techniques to strengthen our movements, campaigns and organizations. The first half of this four-hour workshop will consist of short presentations on different approaches to research; the second half will consist of small group discussions and practical skills development. While coordinated by the Midnight Notes Collective and Team Colors Collective, numerous other organizations will be participating. Panelists will include radical theorists and scholars, community organizers, academics and public intellectuals, geographers and cartographers, research librarians, and artists. Topics include: co-research, community listening sessions, class composition, radical cartography, interventionist and radical art practices, and the importance of theory. Here the workshop incorporates both strategies as well as nuts-and-bolts skills, and offers various strategies to produce knowledge about and from our movements and the communities of which they are a part of.

Connecting Art, Thought, and Politics
Thursday, June 24, 1:00pm – 5:30pm
Cobo Hall D0-02A

I am also excited about this event, organized by 16 Beaver Group:

This workshop will seek to answer the questions: What is the role of art and artists in contemporary social and political movements? How can research and creative work that emerges from within and alongside struggles revive a sense of militancy and pertinence in the face of mounting political, social, and ecological challenges? What tactics and strategies will link disparate efforts? How does cultural production factor into building and bridging divisions between people? And most importantly, what is the relation between art, various social institutions, and ways of understanding and doing politics?

Finally, you can read everything I have to say about interventionist and radical art practices in the US today, as this book includes my essay, “Art as Intervention:  A Guide to Today’s Radical Art Practices,” a chapter in the collection Uses of a Whirlwind: Movement, Movements, and Contemporary Radical Currents in the United States edited by Team Colors Collective, published by AK Press in June 2010.  My chapter looks at the various approaches today’s artists have to the problem of how to make art that promotes social change.  The chapter includes interviews with Mike Bonanno of the Yes Men, Steve Kurtz of Critical Art Ensemble, Paige Sarlin of 16 Beaver Group, Rosten Woo, former Executive Director of the Center for Urban Pedagogy, Natalie Jeremijenko, and Dara Greenwald.