Produced by Adrian Heathfield and Hugo Glendinning

What kind of labour is it, to work communally with the bodies, movements, expressions and affects of others, to dedicate ones lifework to the othering that issues from these relations? Is a life, especially a life spent making, learning, giving and transforming oneself with others, a kind of infrastructure? How might we better understand and value the social and artistic force of such practices?

These questions form the core of Adrian Heathfield and Hugo Glendinning’s new film, which traces and connects some exemplary artistic figures of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, whose art practice escapes identitarian culture by being tuned to a set of barely visible, relational and dispersed activities. Spirit Labour traces a genealogy of creative practices inclined to elemental exposure and non-human forces, as renewals of the passage of humans toward their outsides.