‘Treading Water’, 2023, Richard Ducker

press release:

‘Treading Water’, 2023, is a film about being in Dalston during the summer of 2023. It is an attempt to capture a particular neighbourhood, in this instance where I live in London, and in a way that reflects something of how we experience the real world. With that in mind the screen is broken into 9 boxes each showing a different constructed view or incidental mundane activity, much as a CCTV monitor does. Within the 9 boxes, 5 are shot on a mobile phone in a in nervous, shaky and furtive manner, while the others, in contrast, are of cinematic quality, and treated like a genre still-life painting. This juxtaposition suggests an oscillation between bored reverie, the social curiosity of the flaneur, and solitude of voyeurism. Using this presentational structure the eye looks in vain for a narrative, rather narrative, such as it is, is established by the soundtrack, which takes the viewer on a walk through the neighbourhood. This desire for narrative can be manic but is arrested by the mundane, while the sound acts as an anchor holding the visuals together, in a structuring contextual acoustic “frame”.

The piece can be shown on a single channel, as submitted here, or each box is shown on a separate monitor in a grid format, where all the channels are independent and are of different lengths, so it constantly loops without ever repeating exactly.