A Cold Swim (2021)

2 channel video & audio.

This video work was produced as part of a practice collecting fragments of video footage recorded over a two-month period in Malta. The voices simultaneously ask and answer the same questions, with each voice relegated to different audio channels, the voice of the man and woman relegated to the left and right, respectively. There was not much by the way of logic in the making of this video, but it is the result of work, and a cold swim on a still day.

The relationships contained within the work; between audio and other audio, between video and audio, between one image and another, between left and right, between asker and answerer, between ###### and #######; are all subject to what can be called a ‘beach logic’. At the beach, we are revisiting not just the shore but our relationship to it, our past memories of it. There’s this presence of an ancestral home in the water, the idea of an emergence from the sea to embrace the land, the ever shifting ebb and flow between the construction of ‘land’ and ‘sea’ that is called the tide. When we occupy the beach, we are straddling the liminal space between sea-being and land-being, we are resigned to leisure, we have found a space to play.

To spend the runtime of this video as a bystander on the beach, listening intently, with a peaceful gaze set on the waves roll in from the horizon, would be time well-spent.