François Bucher
White Balance (to think is to forget differences)
2002 DVD, color, sound; 30 minutes.

White Balance reviewed:
The Village Voice, Feb 5
Columna De Arena (in Spanish) Jan 31
Art Forum Feb 2002

The West Project: accompanying web project

January 10 – March 2, 2002
Opening Reception: January 10th, 6-8 PM
Where there is amenability to paraphrase, where the sheets have never been rumpled, there poetry, so to speak, has never spent the night.
—Osip Mandelstam
White Balance (to think is to forget differences) is an effort to uncover the geographies of power, the frontiers of privilege. It revisits this problem from different angles, creating short circuits of meaning which are hosted by improbable audiovisual matches. Media and internet footage is intermixed with images shot in downtown Manhattan before and after the September 11th attacks. The video presents a question that needs to be visited over and over, a question that is always and necessarily larger than ourselves. Yvonne Rainer asked this question in her film Privilege: “…is ‘permanent recovering racists’ the most we can ever be?” In this sense, offering a meta narrative that would pretend to describe the issues at stake, is a failure to understand the layers of unspeakability that are hidden in the question of whiteness. The piece opts for a poetic language, an address that seeks to arouse thought by concentrating on the openings of the audiovisual experience, in the short-lived moment of the in-between.

François Bucher was born in 1972 in Cali, Colombia and lives and works in New York City. He graduated from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1999 with an MFA in film (MFA fellowship recipient). From 1999 – 2000 he attended The Whitney Museum Independent Study Program. He is co editor of Valdez Magazine, Bogotá, Colombia. Bucher has shown his work in Latin America, the United States and Europe. White Balance (to think is to forget differences) was funded in part by The New York City Media Arts Grant of The Jerome Foundation.

Location One (www.location1.org) is a new not-for profit art center, which fosters the convergence of all types of creative expression. We maintain a gallery space suitable for every form of performance and exhibition, and within this space, multimedia net-broadcasting facilities that allow us to webcast a 24-hour stream of both live and archived events. Our International Residency Program invites artists from other countries to experiment with emerging technologies. Location One is an exploration space for continual creative discovery.