Juli Saragosa enjoys collaboration and interdisciplinary practice, extending the practice to the curatorial and educational, as a grassroots organizer, curator and workshop leader, film and media arts instructor, and mentor. Having grown up in an immigrant family with positive encouragement to try everything and with the economic necessity to use whatever is at hand (including a home photography darkroom), Juli was determined to become an artist from an early age. Moving images became a suitable passion for this eternally curious DIY experimenter. Juli’s short films have been shown at festivals in Milan, London, L.A., Chicago, Berlin, Vancouver, Toronto, New York, Tunis, and Irkutsk. In 2005, Amoré won the Best Canadian Film award at Toronto’s International One-minute Film Festival and in 2011, it won the Jury Prize for Experimental Film at the Toronto Underground Film Festival.
Artist Website: jsaragosa.de
Artist Statement
Let Me In (2020) is an interactive web-based queer ASMR piece that uses acoustic close-ups to show how the sum of the parts of a queer body (visible and audible) is read subconsciously in order for a perception of queerness or gender to be made. This work brings those body parts (hair on the upper lip, legs) and accessories of queer life (sequins, queer books, latex gloves) to the foreground. This work explores how the digitization of human connection (all the more relevant during the COVID-19 pandemic), mediated through mouse clicks and the touch of fingertips, and how audio through calming sensual whispers can bring us (queer bodies) a sense of interconnection in an ever more isolating world.