An agential reenactment of a panic attack, and an attempt to redistribute the sensual experience of anxiety throughout my body and into the body of another. Anxiety takes form at the surface of a flexible, skin-like container full of my own breath, which slowly leaks from a small hole.
Found within the installation 'more than half the days' on a single screen loop, The video presents the viewer with both the visible, embodied struggle of the deflation and inflation of a large weather balloon, and a ‘gods-eye view’ of the complete, seemingly futile exercise. The work is not intended to be a show of strength, despite the real exhaustion I felt (and is heard) from this action, as the balloon will deflate regardless of the amount of pressure put on it. The tension does not release in an explosive (and oft expected by viewers) ‘pop’, but in a slow and tedious 14-minutes journey until its anti-climactic ending. The work is a negotiation with the notion of panic as an “attack”—that is, a violent monodirectional act on an object by and an object.
Instead, panic becomes a coming together, that, while still forceful and intense, is in actuality a neutral exchange. Breathe in, breathe out.