Episode 21 – Michele Saint-Michel – Don’t Tell Me I’m Beautiful
I had the pleasure of speaking with performance artist and experimental filmmaker, Michele Saint-Michel about her films, books, performance art, and grief. Michele is a rare soul who has wisdom beyond those of regular mortals. Her poetry films and her perspectives on grief are refreshing and most needed in light of having lost so many loved ones over the past year. There have been so many deaths due to COVID-19, loneliness, suicide, and stress that we need a touchstone of sanity to ground us. Her book, Grief Is an Origami Swan: An Art Book About Grief is available on Amazon.
From Michele’s website:
“Through overlapping layers of imagery, sound, film, textiles, language, and movement, Saint-Michel’s works function as settings, soundtracks, movements, and networks–attending to how time is constructed, manipulated, and, above all, experienced.
Often rendered as experimental film, books, poems, and audio recordings, mixed with the detritus of the natural world (preserved plants and insects), her works create digital and physical spaces of layered cross-sections. The overlap between the cultural, the environmental, and the emotional creates the conditional and reactive multi-temporal space.”
Also, check out her Vimeo page for her recent work.