The Leeds School of
Art, Architecture Design

Video 4 mins, silent

Made with my Brazilian collaborator Patricia Azevedo

That afternoon weâ??d been marvelling together at Vito Acconciâ??s film Three Frame Studies. I guess this was what, conversely, made us think about inhabiting only one edge of the cameraâ??s frame. Weâ??d also been talking about Verbs, a series we had made four years ago which Patricia thought we should revisit. One of the verbs weâ??d worked with was Equilibrar - to Balance. Reusing our own title as a starting point, we started to play.

The badly focused video you see here was a tryout. A process of testing framing, pace etc. and deciding if the idea was worth pursuing. We made some adjustments and refilmed in different ways. We tried substituting a glass of wine for the cup of water to make the balanced liquid visible and reference the strange world of private views. Yet this seemed beside the point. So, now, did the concern with the videoâ??s edge. Worryingly each try was worse than the previous one; we had become too experienced at passing the cup to each other and couldnâ??t hope to reproduce the clumsy/delicate tentativeness and gentle humour of the first take. However our â??try outâ??, in depicting not-knowingness, illustrates and asserts its potential. In its own way, this new and imperfect Equilibrar - to Balance speaks eloquently of the act of collaboration itself.

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