Julie Perini: The Blog

How fun is this:  On Monday morning, two smart, sassy artist-activists (Ryan Pierce and Amy Harwood of the organization Signal Fire) will pack me into their car and take me to an undisclosed location, deep in Mt. Hood National Forest.  Once there, they will install me into a 12′ x 12′ tent, feed me daily, and set me loose in the wilderness.  I have never camped in one place in the woods for 7 days straight and I am curious to find out what the forest has to say to me if I pay attention for that long. I do not know what kind of artwork will result from this experiment, but whatever emerges will be on view at a group show at the Pacific Northwest College of Art in Portland this coming November.

I’ll be TOTALLY CUT-OFF and COMPLETELY UNREACHABLE by phone or email or anything else during the entire residency, through Sunday, August 15.  I don’t believe I’ve been offline like this since the early 90s.

Girl Next Door Sneak Peak from Julie Perini on Vimeo.

A new video to be released real, real soon.

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

This is not my studio but isn't it nice?

Julie Perini Studios is up and running in the St. Johns neighborhood of Portland, OR.  Come see me at Cathedral Park Place.