Julia Sterre Schmitz (Amsterdam, NL, 1993) is a filmmaker and photographer who graduated at the Royal Academy of Art, The Netherlands. While experimenting with various media, she found herself mostly reflecting upon the practice of image making itself, interrogating the genre of documentary and its ethical dimensions. This brought her to Goldsmiths, University of London, where she is currently finalising the MA Visual Anthropology. She focusses her master research on knowledges around female pleasure and its modes of representation through medico-sexological images and artistic interventions, which comes together into the film: Come Here Come Here.

Her work includes questioning spontaneity as well as performativity when it comes to ‘recording reality’. She is interested in the relationship between reflexivity and truthfulness, which she scrutinises in her most recent video work Under Construction – A Video Essay (selected by Sight & Sound Magazine, BFI – best video essays of 2018). With tongue in cheek, the work questions the popular discussion around the notion of a ‘constructed reality’ in film, while in turn revealing its own fabrication. From reality TV shows to high-brow documentary films, she is fascinated by how reality is presented and consumed (her parallel life as a freelancer for e.g. social media influencers fuels these fascinations).

Her investigations in ways of representing realities often result in experiments with non-linear constructions, both in physical forms of viewing as in edit structures, like her documentary film installation Tropical Fish in the North Sea. By simultaneously using and reflecting upon conventional modes of documentary storytelling, she aims to playfully point the viewers to their own act of seeing, believing and constructing.

 

Education

2018-2019   MA Visual Anthropology, Goldsmiths University, London

2013-2017   Interactive/Media/Design, Royal Academy of Arts The Hague

2012-2013   Communication & Multimedia Design, Hogeschool van Amsterdam

 

 

Exhibitions/screenings

2019 Under Construction  –   Prelon Musk: Acts of Kleinness, London

2018 Tropical Fish in the North Sea – Festimi, Amsterdam

2017 Royal Academy of Arts Graduation Show

2013 CSI: VBW, GEM Museum of Contemporary Art, The Hague NL

2013 On all fours, TodaysArt Festival, The Hague NL

 

Freelance film & photography 

Photography: i.a. Storyboard Agency ( i.a. Van Dobbe, Rituals, ANWB, ASICS, Jack Daniels, Heineken), Lipcote&Co, Markttheater, Heineken Experience
Aftermovies/promovideos/edits: i.a. WeMakeVR, Stukafest, Bedrijvenspiegel, Lipcote&Co London, Van Gogh Experience