Bea de Visser's video Blow Up comes without sound, and that is just as well. If you would also hear what you see, it would add up to a rather unsavoury spectacle; now it is mainly fascinating. Four little girls (with slits between their teeth and brightly coloured elastic bands in their hair) are taking turns to blow a chunk of pink chewing gum into a huge bubble. You can only see the bottom halves of their faces, where De Visser zoomed in with her camera. Despite the innocence of their age, the girls' lips are moist and red, their tongues dark pink and the bubbles they blow are erotically round. It is this ambiguity that De Visser keeps emphasizing: by discarding the sound, showing the images in slow motion, by occasionally stopping and then repeating the ima…es. The chewing-gum bubbles are reminiscent of breasts and inflatable dolls. They swell up, which yields a strange, abstract image, then they burst and slowly collapse, while a trickle of saliva slowly dribbles down. In other films, such as Accessories for Girls (2002) and Spleen and Ideal (2001), De Visser also plays with seduction and innocence, with adulthood and childhood, with offensive images that can be surprisingly beautiful at the same time.

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