Vincent’s Breakfast
Vincent’s Breakfast, 18 min 20 seconds, colour, sound, 4k video, 2025
Notes
Vincent’s Breakfast was filmed over four-days, during which a mother and her two-year-old son were documented moving through their daily routines. A particular breakfast scene stood out in the edit as the setting of the table and the morning light created a semi-staged space for Vincent’s character to be observed in. In the scene, Vincent’s behaviour comes across as fragmented, even abstract, creating a rhythmic performativity to his presence on camera. He disrupts the rhythm with various behaviours that suggest an unease towards abstraction most noticeably when he gets upset about a ruptured egg and resists his apple being cut. His reaction reflects an early stage of object constancy, where deviations from an object's perceived essential properties create a sense of loss or irreversibility, momentarily destabilizing his understanding of reality. Kids at this age can also assign anthropomorphic qualities to objects, empathising with them and perceiving their formal changes as injuries.
In another moment Vincent repeatedly bathes a piece of bread in a glass of water, despite his mother’s opposition. He seems to explore cause and effect—how objects absorb, transform, and respond to touch. He exercises his agency within a fixed environment by continously playing despite opposition, as if testing a small transgression of safety—defining his boundaries and his relationship to authority.