Soft Life: The Body

How can the soft body challenge social hierarchies? We turn our gaze towards the soft life of the body and unpack new ways of thinking about embodiment in artistic practice with Somerset House studios artists Florence Peake on radical softness in somatics, choreographer and writer Dr Martin Hargreaves on the history of protest through softness in dance, Ilona Sagar on rendering bodies hard through architecture and disabled film maker Jameisha Prescod on the colonial history of black pain. Soft Life: Experiments In New Ways of Being Soft Life is part of a growing number of movements challenging the way we work. How can soft approaches in art help us rethink our relationship to time, the body and the earth? In March 2020, the non-stop nature of our 24/7 world came to a stop. For many in the Western world, it allowed us a space to reconsider the way we value our time and with that our relationship to work. Now, amidst the strikes and the resignations, a new movement  is emerging called ‘Soft Life’. which seeks to sidestep the values of hustle culture for slowness and ease.  How can softness open up new ways of being in the world and create different types of value? Could it be a way of healing our relationship with the natural world at a point of crisis? In this four-part series we take the idea of ‘soft life’ as a launch off point to explore alternative ideas around work, time, the body and ecology emanating from Somerset House and beyond. We talk to radical thinkers, artists and writers, who are carving out these new ways of being in the body, centring the soft and the in-between, finding space for rest and looking at ways of expanding time beyond the clock. Soft Life is produced by Alannah Chance and Axel Kacoutié With sound by Axel Kacoutié and additional music by Ellen Zweig