Let Go,
Video Still
Isle de Breyhat, France
2007
The title, Let Go is a command, an instruction to release one’s grasp or hold, to become unrestrained or abandon inhibitions, to also forget and discard old ideas. It is a demand to act, and a proposal that is contradictory to its image.
The video confronts the viewer with an image of a woman (myself) standing on a rocky beach, in a situation where it is not clear whether she is approaching or receding, in a position of neither arrival nor departure. Movement within the image is minimal, and limited to the sea current and strong wind, except on occasion the viewer notices some head-shaking and the occasional rolling back of eyes from the human in the scene.
Although the strong wind is visible in the image, its sound has been replaced by white noise from the radio, whose role was to merge and treat all movement within the shot as one. The sound is composed of a continuous shifting (forwards and backwards) between radio stations, at most times remaining in-between stations, and never settling at any single station for too long, never allowing for (linguistic) comprehension to emerge from any position.
It is a work about the improbable; a constructed situation that welcomes the occasion of the accident, a once-off concert about an assumed freedom, confronting foreignness, and self-contradiction.
video by Jean-Noel Vinter
© Donna Kukama, 2007