Floating Mass
The figure is lifted out of a wheelchair to swim. The person loosens and relaxes as she exercises weightless, supported by the water as the film progresses. Her movements give a sense of freedom. The film implies a positive and uplifting ending.
This film treats, once more, the sensation of the body as an impossible weight of corporeality. It is alleviated by swimming. The inadequate limbs are freed to sense the weightless energy that their original state used to engender in the director's consciousness. The body dissolves into fluidity, liquefying and “pouring-away” into the ideal reticulations of the swimming pool's lane-markings. The images dwell upon the distance between the clumsy frog-strokes of the swimmer, and the Cartesian clarity of the medium of liquid light that alternately suspends it in weightlessness, and fractures it into disjunction.
– John Outram
Description source: publicity materials