Dancing Grains, video stills
Dancing Grains, 2015
Video performance. 01’ 54’’ Loop
Dancing Grains is a video performance that re-enacts Francis Alÿs’ animation piece Song for Lupita, made in 1998. Song for Lupita portrays a woman pouring water from one glass into another, Dancing Grains records the action of pouring dust from one glass into another.
Filming took place at the Moving Image Studios at the Royal College of Art.
In Dancing Grains, the glass is half filled with approximately 250 grams of flour. Things are never merely visual, and in this case the sound itself is charged with weight. I remember that, of everything that is said in Wang Bing’s documentary Dead Souls (2018), what struck me most was the 250-gram ration per person, per day, at the camp: the exact weight that placed people on the wrong side of death.