Fragments of a Flow : a Thread of Water in the Video Work
of Irit Batsry

It carries, it changes.

It can't be grasped.

Like memory.

You can't bath in the same river twice.

You can't see an image twice, not in the same way.

Water has been flowing through my video work starting with the opening shot of my first videotape : " Slightly Less Than a Saint " (20 min., 1981), in which it is used in a performative ritual.

Water appears in every one of my tapes thereafter, but the tape which is dominated by it is " Leaving the Old Ruin " (34 min., 1986-89), a sea journey, a passage from past to future, through which fragments of a haunted collective and personal memory are revealed.

Water acts here as the carrier of memory with scenes emerging from water and receding into it. Water's cleansing-threatening duality is evoked in the text :

" Like this man running away,

his situation is very fragile,

if he lets these fragments go will he become hollow ?

Will the water fill him up and drawn him ?

Will it purge and leave him clean and ready for a new life ?

Will the water bring cure or death ?

Will the journey immunize or terminate ?

Will writing on water become death by water or cure by water ?

This slow journey fluctuating between immunizing and terminating. "

In " Traces of a Presence to Come " (39 minutes, 1989-93), water is being used in a scene evoking the construction of a new world. Different creation myths are evoked through images (a bird crosses a vast stretch of water, chaotic matter takes form), and text :

" In the beginning there was a long period of rejection.

We refused your ideas, we abandoned your language.

.....

As a result we could not read any more that the world was created in 7 days.

Nor that there was, or was not a Big Bang.

Whether the universe was expanding, oscillating or pulsating, was all equal to us.

We were determined to create our own. "

With a clear reference to the Biblical : " In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep; and the Spirit of God was moving over the face of the waters " (Genesis 1:1-2).

In the last scene of this work, when the " alien " accepts his/her humanity, water transforms into earth : fluid becomes solid.

" Scale " (12 min. 1995) is composed of fleeting, fluid transitions of fragments shot in many places, all of them near the sea : Lisbon, Vigo, Tel Aviv, Cadiz, San Sebastian, Bremen, the Haag. Transformed through image-processing, these places are unrecognizable, but the visual, cultural and historical effects induced by the proximity of the sea, transpires.

" These Are Not My Images (neither there nor here) ", 80 minutes, 2000 follows a passage through South India. We see daily activities, banal and sacred impregnated by the presence of water :

A man washing his herd : a feeling of a complete immersion, of becoming one with the animals and the water emanates from this scene.

Women washing cloths : hands turning colorful fabrics in the water, a tedious activity turns into a fascinating dance. Hands hitting the surface with parcels of fabric, suggesting that water can also be hard.

A man jumping into the water pond of a temple. We hear the sentence : " I have crossed a border " : water as a symbol of a new beginning.

An oar passes through water bringing up images through the textures : water again as a carrier of memories .

Fishermen at the sea shore : the horizon appears to be literally infinite through the illusion of an endless pan: water evoking an opening, an infinity.

The sea as infinity can also be found in the video installation ...of absence of persistence..., 1991 . Viewers entering a transparent building, the Museu de Arte Moderna in Rio de Janeiro, are aware of it's location between the city and the Bay of Guanabara. The bay is unseen, but its existence suggests the possibility of a departure. This opening is juxtaposed with the sense of stasis created by the presence of a sand filled boat in the center of the space.

I am currently working on " Fuller's Flow ", an itinerary of installations at the Biosphere in Montreal, a geodesic dome built by Buckminster Fuller which has become an Ecowatch center dedicated to observation and safeguard of water. In this project I would like to pursue the exploration of water both as a physical element and as a metaphor, and to explore a parallel between water and the electronic image both being a flow, a stream, an energy.