About the Portland Diary Summit
Hello!
I am a lifelong journaler, longtime maker of personal films, and for the past 12+ years, I have been creating a daily video that I call a Minute Movie. In my travels through the worlds of experimental and documentary film, visual art, literary arts, and the healing arts, I have encountered many kindred spirits: keepers of notebooks, collectors of fragments, daily doodlers.
The Portland Diary Summit came about because I wanted to create community around these practices, to not feel so alone myself in these daily activies that ground me creatively and emotionally. I wondered: What kinds of art could we make from our daily life material if we felt more supported in that endeavor? How can careful sharing of private material connect us and increase our understanding of one another?
The Portland Diary Summit 2024 will offer workshops, discussions, screenings, and community building events around the practices of diary writing, diary video/film, and the use of this personal material in the creation of works of art. The event will bring together Portland’s writing, film and visual art communities, as well as anyone who considers journaling and daily life documenting to be therapeutic, sacred, liberatory, a path to the unconscious or otherwise of interest.
The writing, film, and visual art presented at the Portland Diary Summit will invite you into the private worlds of the artists: domestic spaces, homelands, families, bodies, interior lives, and more. These artists take control of their own representations, often rejecting limited mainstream portrayals of their identities in favor of crafting more nuanced and authentic portraits of who they are and how they experience the world.
I believe in the power of this kind of art and I want to see more of it.
See you on February 24!
Julie Perini
The Portland Diary Summit is partially funded by a grant from the Regional Arts & Culture Council. Thanks RACC!