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Tending to the Archive at Millennium Film Workshop

workshop for working artists and media professionals //  Sunday, October 6, 2024
Millennium Film Workshop, New York, New York

promotional material for the workshop
Tending to the Archive workshop slides
Tending to the Archive workshop slides
Artists and filmmakers accumulate large amounts of media as we journey through our creative lives and as we research projects. How can we care for and organize the media that accrue around us in ways that are meaningful to us and our work? Some media is physical: reels of film and video tapes staring at us from the shelves as they slowly decay. Other media is digital, bulging out of our phones and drives, occupying space in our minds every time we get a notification that we’re at 90% capacity.  And some media exists on paper such as notes and drawings. All of these media formats hold time, they hold memories for us and for others. What is that experience like for us as artists, to be responsible for these time capsules, to hold these moments from the past? Can we create ways to catalog our collections, outside of techno-corporate structures? What does it mean for individuals and communities to be the keepers of their own archives?

Taking place within my exhibition, Minute Movies: The Daily Diary Video Work of Julie Perini, at the Tending to the Archive workshop, I discussed my methods for gathering, archiving, and processing ten years of personal video documentation and transforming it into works of art. The workshop attracted filmmakers working with family home movies and queer archives, film industry professionals, archivists, visual artists, and more. Workshop participants and I took a close look at the database I created to catalog my long-term daily video project, Minute Movies. I also discussed other projects I have worked on that involve wrangling massive amounts of media.

Participants were invited to share their own piles of media, notes, and objects: home movies, personal videos, writing, drawings, research for projects, and anything else. We looked at the work of filmmakers, visual artists, and writers to inspire our own creative projects, including Sheila Heti, On Kawara, Jonas Mekas and Carmen Winant. This workshop was not technical; it was not about the latest research and recommendations on archival media formats. Rather, it was a generative space to share ideas, practices, and knowledge around organizing our documents, be it personal documentation, artistic notes, historical material, and more. Participants walked away with resource lists and ideas to support their creative projects.
Julie Perini is a filmmaker and artist in Portland, Oregon.