Julie Perini: The Blog

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.

Tuesday night’s talk at Portland’s Grand Detour Experimental Media Space was super fun.  The audience included some friends but also a lot of folks who were new to me.  Somehow this crowd got me sharing all kinds of stories from my past, from FBI run-ins to artistic ephiphanies.  The great Portland filmmaker Karl Lind recorded the entire thing, so maybe I’ll be able to post it here one day. Thanks to Dustin Zemmel and everybody else at Grand Detour!  I am excited about this space.

Screening/Talk: Shoot First & Ask Questions Later
Grand Detour Experimental Media Space
215 SE Morrison St., Suite 2020, Portland, OR
Tuesday, June 8, 2010, 7:00pm – 9:00pm