Twins is a chronological arrangement of film shot in New York City between 8 September and 12 October 2001.
Union Gaucha Productions (Karin Schneider and Nicolás Guagnini) were working on a film concerning bridges connecting buildings. On 8 September they shot the mirrored bridge connecting the North Tower and World Trade Centre 7. As the towers collapsed, so did the meaning of the footage within its former context. Union Gaucha Productions then invited filmmaker Jeff Preiss to collaborate on a piece using this material.
Pt. I is shot by Karin Schneider and Nicolás Guagnini, with Pt. II shot by Jeff Preiss. The edited sequence of Pt. I served as the editing score for Pt. II, producing identical corresponding cuts between the two sets of footage.
The music accompanying Pt. I was recorded by Paulo Vivacqua near the Twin Towers in the week of 11 September 2001.
Union Gaucha Productions was founded in New York in 1997 by artists Karin Schneider (born 1970, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil) and Nicolás Guagnini (born 1966, Buenos Aires, Argentina), and was active until 2010. Distinct from Schneider and Guagnini’s individual practices, under the guise of a ‘film production company’ they produced work, often collaborating with other artists, architects, musicians, performers, filmmakers and thinkers. In 2015 Artists Space, NY presented the first retrospective of their work. The two were founding members of Orchard, NY in 2005.
Jeff Preiss is a filmmaker living in New York and has been in the production of experimental cinema since the early eighties. He was a board member of The Collective For Living Cinema and a founding member of Orchard, NY. His work has been exhibited internationally, including at the Museum of Modern Art New York, at the Musée d’art moderne de la Ville Paris, Museum Boijmans, San Francisco Cinematheque, P.S.1, Anthology Film Archives, Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin and ICA, London. Preiss is now a board member at Light Industry, a venue for film and electronic art in Brooklyn, New York.
