I intended to create a video essay exploring my relationship with my hands and skin through boxing, crocheting, and self-harm. I began the project with the questions, how can I visually portray the process behind crocheting that is not just a video of me crocheting the object and is not a piece of writing that explains why I created the object, how can I use performance to portray the process behind crocheting using minimal amounts of language? By process, I am thinking about the intentions behind a piece, not necessarily the how of making. How does one expand a viewer's experience of an art object? Last year I was never asked to write an artist statement, and my professors focused on the title of the piece. I see this project as an artist statement and expansion of the crocheted wall from Intrusive Meditation, a project I made last semester. 

PERRA was hard for me to engage with and is quite difficult for me to think about because it sparks thoughts that make me feel unsafe in my skin. For many reasons, there is a part of me that says I should not have read Defecting Witness: The Difficulty in Watching Regina José Galindo's PERRA. There is a kind of gratifying release in self-harm that became too enticing after reading Mengesha’s description of Galindo’s performance. Nevertheless, Galindo’s work is important, so I will lean into discomfort. Galindo’s body becomes a site of memory. Throughout the performance, she invites the viewer to encounter and recognize the victims and violence unacknowledged by the government in Guatemala. Through her performance, the viewer to engage in Galindo’s process of remembrance and recognition. I started crocheting with similar yarn to the same piece I made last semester, creating a large blue spherical structure that became the test object for the final video. Unsatisfied with the direction of this object, I changed the color and texture of the yarn to lead the viewer through a more focused connection between the yarn and self-harm. 

Initially, I wanted to shoot the video by myself, though since the video was ultimately a performance documentation, the studio manager training me on the equipment suggested I have someone help me to focus the camera and make sure the camera was recording so I would not have to worry about the technology when performing. When we were setting up for the performance, we struggled to get a wide enough shot where you could not see the information beyond the backdrop. Typically, you do not want the subject close to the backdrop because the shadows become confusing. (This is happening in the wider shot of my full body and is not satisfying to me) If I were to reshoot this video, I would have used a different lens to get a wider shot, and I would have had a third camera to capture the more zoomed-in shot unraveling the crochet without my hands. I intended to have the sound of me boxing throughout the video. 

If I had another month, I would further develop the connection between my relationship to both boxing and crocheting being about the meditative quality of both a repetitive crochet stitch and boxing combinations. I would demonstrate how there is a rhythm to boxing in similar ways to the pattern of crocheting hyperbolic planes by recording boxing combinations that fit the flow of me undoing the object. I would also like to consider the pile. I could imagine a video diptych or continuation of this video that documents me consolidating the pile into a neat ball of yarn and then crocheting it again into the same sphere. I could also imagine an installation with the video and the pile as evidence of the performance, yet this seems less complete to me.