Images Disturbed by an Intense Parasite
Film and Video Programme
March – June 2020
Richard Porter, The Breakers, 2019
27 minutes 35 seconds
On a remote island, as a storm approaches, a solitary figure spends their days studying the horizon and swimming in the sea, while a vision of a witch haunts their thoughts and dreams.
The figure performs a ritual with washed-up debris and, when asleep, sees a nuclear fallout, as well as a pink dopplegänger wandering in a faraway place.
Finally a voice speaks, but are they ready to hear it?
The Breakers is a filmed performance by Richard Porter using recorded live music by long-time collaborator Timothy Thornton. Porter's filmed performances often locate himself in a landscape, usually shorelines and interiors, where long camera-shots show his body as vulnerable, isolated and searching for something unknown, presumably lost. As with his other performance work, experiments with characterisation seek to highlight the artifice and performativity of gender.
This work is filmed entirely on an iPhone, giving a sense of spontaneity and DIY immediacy to much of the footage (at one point the camera falls to the floor in slow motion). At the end of the film an artificial voice speaks to Porter from the viewer’s perspective and apologises for “leaving” him. The thing that has been watching him all along is discovered and knocked over, his wildness and animal-like nature revealed. In these times of deadly pandemic and self-isolation The Breakers speaks to a feeling of loneliness, the fragility of the human body and the blissful joy and abandon of the waves as a primeval site of healing and redemption.
This film was premiered in 2019 at the ICA, London as part of Queers Read This (3)https://www.ica.art/live/queers-read-this-3