ISLAND

By Sam Williams and Laura Grace Ford

Commissioned by Somerset House Studios London 2021 as part of Hyper Functional Ultra Healthy.

Performed and filmed by Leah Marojevic, Samir Kennedy and Sam Williams.

Sound by Samir Kennedy

ISLAND presents a collage of dérives in London, Berlin and Marseille where bodies connect through remembered gestures, reaching for familiarity through sensory and temporal networks.
Dérives evade the neoliberal pressure to be ‘yourself’, to be an entrepreneurial, self-promoting individual. In the encounter with other life-worlds you escape your own reflection, inhabit other minds.
Fred Moten and Stefano Harney use the term hapticality to describe the affective textures that can be accessed through others. They describe ‘modernity’s insurgent feel, its inherited caress...the feel that no individual can stand, and no state abide.’
We make use of the term hapticality as an incubator of counter-strategies. Hapticality is be applied to the way we feel cities, through and with others, others who may or may not exist in the present. Feeling becomes collective knowledge, a tacit, covert network.