Growing up in his family, music was the thing. Perretta and his sister, along with other nineties kids from their London borough, attended a council-funded music school on weekends which gave out free instruments. He received a classical guitar. As a teenager, music videos were the thing. He’d watch Channel U, a British music television channel airing often homemade, handheld videos from the local grime scene, and then go out and make films with his friends. Art came much later, and just in time.
In 2008, as a 20-year-old architecture student, Perretta stopped in at Serpentine Gallery on a whim, where “Blue” by the late multidisciplinary artist and filmmaker Derek Jarman was showing. A static blue screen set to a soundscape in which Jarman speaks his lyrical thoughts aloud; musings and matter-of-facts about his deteriorating condition living with AIDS, and losing his eyesight. “It shook me to my core,” Perretta remembers, feeling especially moved as his mother was critically ill with cancer at the time. He didn’t want to be an architect anymore; “Blue” had completely broken open his definition of a creative practice. He picked up a video camera again, and eventually enrolled to do his MFA at Slade School of Fine Art.