I think we are very scared of stopping, and resting. I think in a culture that is focused on speed, ultra-healthy, hyper-functional, we see rest as some kind of failure.

Recently work has gotten a lot worse for a lot of people, very quickly.

You know you have to work, work, work. Make that money, make that money.

It is necessary now to bring more of yourself to the job, than it was maybe 50 years ago if you were working in a factory.

Which is like grind culture.

I don't like the term productivity.

If I love my job, then I won't mind answering emails at midnight.

Our worth is not only tied to our ability to produce, to be awake.

People are pushing back now, against the way that work doesn't just stay in your sort of nine to five or ten to six, but it expands both outward in time, and sort of outward in your person.

Don't cover this over. Don't put a bandaid on this. Don't look at soft life, or the lazy movement in China, don't look at the Great Resignation as perversions of the status quo, think of this as a beautiful form of air and sea.

The soft life is the black movement of freedom.

We are talking about, in this video, how to live a soft life baby.

If you're wanting to live a soft life, I don't think you're lazy. I think you've been living in your masculine energy for so long, and you've been sold a lie about how a woman can and should do what men do.

Black people and black girls specifically kind of making these TikToks and these Reels that are about laying back and sort of not being stressed, and out there, and grinding.

Go to sleep at night. Ask for help ladies. I am not about to break my back for anything going forward.

It's about denouncing hustle culture. Capitalism is not soft living.

It's a total movement of black fem TikTok or like IG users campaigning to have a soft life era in your life, like taking care of yourself basically.

And I think that the soft life is also about having the hard conversations.

Oh yeah.

Our attitude to work is changing. Last year saw high rates of people leaving their jobs in the UK and the US. This year, workers are striking for better pay. Soft life is part of a number of movements challenging the way we work.

It's not that the idea that you should love your work is new, right? It's been true for a lot of history that certain kinds of work we have expected to be done out of love, and that would be women's work unpaid in the home, the kind of caring, cleaning, feeding, loving of the family, right? We've always expected that to be done out of love. And then creative work we've always expect to be done out of love for sort of the art itself.

Writer Sarah Jaffe is author of Work Won't Love You Back.

But I do think that there is a ground swell of whether we want to call it refusal of work, anti-work sentiment, like lying flat, which is the Chinese version of it, soft life, which is the one that I'm only just learning about now, or the Great Resignation, or quiet quitting, or any number of these things, and many of these things have like historic echos.
Like when quiet quitting was the hot trend I would talk a lot about work to rule, which is something that the labour movement has and does still use as a tactic, which is basically you just do your job exactly the way the sort of workplace handbook has it, or your manager tells you to.

Soft life is a refusal, but what does it mean to refuse to work? We need to work to survive. How can soft life allow for different ways of being?

When you first mentioned soft life, it makes me think about a softening of a lot of the structures and codes, and some of that is around how we work, and when we work. How we gather and when we gather. What we think of as professionalism.

Rest is one strategy artists are using as a form of resistance.

My name is Raquel Meseguer Zafe and I am an artist and theatre maker. I live with an invisible disability and have done for 17 years, and a lot of my work is around rest and horizontality and reframing disabled people's experiences.

Raquel was part of this year's Hyper-Functional Ultra-Healthy, a programme of artist-led approaches to wellness and care at Somerset House Studios.

Rest began for me as a necessary practise. I was at the Southbank Centre in the afternoon, and I went up to the sixth floor to find a quiet place to lie down and rest. At that point I'd been living with chronic pain for 10 years. So I'd gone up to the sixth floor and found a kind of quiet corridor. I'd rolled out my little mat, which I carried with me in those days, taken off my shoes, and placed them very neatly next to me, and I had rested for about maybe five or 10 minutes when a security guard tapped me on the shoulder and told me I triggered a security alert by lying down, and I had to sit up.
It made me want to challenge the etiquette of our public spaces and ask other people about their attempts to rest and lie down in public, and it eventually became an installation and performance piece called A Crash Course In Cloud Spotting. People talked about resting in stationary cupboards and on trains, but in toilets a lot. The overall picture was of people going to great lengths to carry on living their lives in a world that's not designed for them.

Begin by taking a deep breath in for three seconds. And exhaling, releasing any bad energy. Inhale once more, and imagine your lungs filling with fresh, clean air. And as you exhale, feel your body contracting, pushing you further into the surface that you're on. Feel your shoulders relax as they push further and further into the surface.

Soft life spooled out on social media and collected into folds online. But it sprang from a particular context, Nigerian women who are choosing a life of comfort and low-stress, and refusing the values of grind culture.

If you want to see yourself, then you have to rest. As in if you want to meet who you are, then you have to be able to have some time off.

At the end of the day I just want you to breathe with me.

I'm Naville de Costa I am an artist, a performer, choreographer, and I am one of the two creators of Black Power Naps.

I'm Sosa I am an artist, a scholar. I am the other half of Black Power Naps.

Artist Naville de Costa, and Sosa, make work under the name Black Power Naps. They create interactive installations clad with soft surfaces where black people and people of colour can rest.

Primarily the work is a sculptural proposal that is centred around a conversation about the sleep gap. The sleep gap being the study that discovers that white Americans have an hour more sleep per night than black Americans. Also that black Americans are getting less quality deep sleep than their white counterparts.

I'm going to breathe a couple of times, and then I'm going to yawn, and you're going to do that with me. Okay. Let's do it.

So we are all suffering under a production-based society. Some are dying and some are not, so we are dealing with like sleep deprivation on a systemic level, you know? What we are also seeing is like lower life expectancies in black communities and also televised instances of black people being violated for arresting. So we're looking at an endemic situation of black people just severely deprived from rest and leisure and idle time. So Black Power Naps is meant to address this problematic in time and space.

In Rest As Resistance, the writer Tricia Hersey says, "Rest as resistance is a total pause on everything we have ever been taught, from a white supremacist, capitalist lens. This will look like rest being available to everyone."

I love this term rest as resistance, I think it's really exciting that there's been so many people who make projects around rest and around sleeping and denoting that our worth is not only tied to our ability to create, to produce, to be awake, to put our body through the line every single day.

Rest as resistance kind of goes hand-in-hand with rest as preparation, which I think sometimes can be a little more politicised than rest as resistance, and it's not just [inaudible 00:13:40] individual kind of like, "I'm going to get me some bubble soap and I'm going to get me some chocolate and then I resisted."

My name is Bayo Akomolafe and I'm from Nigeria, the Yoruba people. I think of what I do as breaking open spaces of power. So I describe my intellectualism as a trans-public intellectualism. It might be said that coloniality, or white modernity, is a form of hard life. It's how things are organised and marked and signed and categorised and archived and sausagized in such a way as to say to the citizen that the world is still, there's nothing more to be done, except to live within the space of capture, right? Soft life is the fugative outgrowth of something else that can not yet be named.
My son desperately represents this, he embodies soft life. He's on the autistic spectrum, he's five years old, and there's something about his refusal to enter fully into the symbolic order of the citizen, that means for me, an invitation to lose a little bit of my so-called neurotypicality, and to dance with his spaces, to use common pollens when he has a meltdown. It's not a meltdown, it's a call to stay with the softness of the moment.

When I first started working with rest seven years ago, there wasn't that much, whereas now I see more and more projects that are around rest and other ways of working. So I do think there's something bubbling up. Yeah, I really do, and I think the pandemic has maybe accelerated that.
The folds, the yoga mats, and turn this gallery into a resting space. I think rest and the horizontal has got a lot to offer as a mode of the experience in art together in a different way. So lying down out in public does normally require a bit of equipment, and we've got two yoga mats that I'm going to unfurl. You know, if you watch a group of people in a gallery, people generally spend a few minutes in front of an artwork and then go to the next one, and go to the next one. It's like a ... it's quite a predictable rhythm, whereas there are works that I've rested with, I have a different relationship with ... I remember them really differently, and I think the artists would actually like people to engage with the artwork more deeply.
So if we want that, we sort of need to build more inviting spaces for people to do that in. I'm going to do what people don't like me doing in public, which is take my shoes off. People get very nervous that it might be a signal that you're staying for a long time. And something ... in other cultures, shoes off when you get home or when you go into a temple, where you go ... it's like totally normal, but in this culture it's not very normal. So I think people get very worried that it's a sign that you might be trying to move in.
We're in Gallery 31 with Christine Sun Kim's exhibition, which is called Edges Of Sign Language. There are four pieces that are sign language represented in a visual form. I'm kind of at once aware of what the artist is working with, and kind of wanting me to think about the physical space of language, but they're also ... they feel like pals, like landscapes or mammals to rest with, and maybe that is a really anti-capitalist gesture, it's like I haven't come here to get any cultural currency from this, I'm just here with you and with this artwork and with this space. But we're just spending time together.

Feel your arms resting. From your shoulder to your elbow to your wrist, through all five fingers. Feel your fingertips become very heavy against the surface, as the surface pushes back towards them. Feel the energy in your arms running up and down, pushing your arms further and further down, heavier and heavier.

I think the image of rest, and there's sort of a real form of rest, of sort of true leisure that is very hard to commodify, and then there are all sorts of forms of sort of commodified quasi-rest that are sort of being sold back to us, right? So like there's a form of sort of rest that is still seen as somehow productive, and then there's sort of real rest that is excessive.

Often I have to resist this idea that we should rest more so that we can be more productive, and I don't think it works like that, we just should rest more full stop.

No actually, like rest is our right, because we're human, not because we work. Doing nothing can be deeply political.

Hustle culture and white supremacy are intrinsically linked because of the foundations of late-stage capitalism, which was slavery and the mass mobilising of enslaved labour and labourers. And one of the big elements or areas where that coercion would happen is on sleep. So there was a lot of research about how to break sleep and how to ... and exactly what little sleep was needed in order to create a functioning person, but that wouldn't have the will to escape.
People would sleep three, four, five hours a night and then be woken up by loud sounds and stressful treatment, and then would have to work in the field for 15, 16, 17, 18 hours. Instituting Sundays as a day off was something that was done way later, because they actually saw that folks would work better if they had a day of rest. So that is all to say there was a deliberate research on how to break the will, how to break the minds, how to break the bodies, and at the same time maximising enslaved labourers to be the most efficient and productive. So in the nutshell, that's where hustle culture comes from.

To refuse to take a position in the system, to refuse to play the part that's expected of you, disrupts the power structure, and that comes with a price.

You know, we have had threats, we have had people like vandalise our installations, dox us, like conservatives who are really angry about being more restful in your life, and like it's really intense, it's really can be very scary. That already also highlights how needed the conversation is, but also how dire it is out here.

The idea of soft life is inherently political. It's the same with rest, in some ways it can sound like soft activism, but actually rest and care are political and they're not ... it's not soft politics, it's quite radical politics. I think we have to be explicit about how political it is, because the terms themselves might be too soft.

Language is only symptomatic of these assemblages, but the presumption that we can language it in a final way is already a form of wanting to master the cracks. A good way to think about cracks, first we have a situation of normative and convenient continuity, right? You plan, you make plans for tomorrow, you've bought your tickets, you're going on a holiday, things are running smoothly. And then something happens that throws you off balance, it could be a wide ranging, from having a fever, to witnessing and being part of a world-shattering pandemic, you know?
Something happens that turns you into something different, and alters your course of orientation. It's a querying of patterns of relationships. It calls into question the forms we've assumed and says, "How about this?"

I think it's also very important to realise it's like, as much as there is this like really powerful stance behind like creating these proposals like soft life or Rest As Resistance, these are coming from like really marginal experiences, people are quite literally dying, it's not a joke, it's a war, and there needs to be always like a justice model when it comes to like really unpacking movements, you know?

There needs to be an awareness that hopefully one day we will all live a soft life, but there is a social component to everyone living the soft life. And I think that the soft life is also about having the hard conversations.

Yeah.

Remember that. The soft life needs to have the hard conversations as well.

What is possible creatively in this space? Instead of trying to represent it, name it, point it out, and sell it to the mainstream, let's build politics around it. This is what I try to do. Suddenly we are faced with the prospects of new forms of thinking, new questions we don't know what to do with. So this feels like a form of escape, a way of saying, "There ought to be other ways to think about time and place and the body, that isn't already meditated and modulated by capitalism."

There is a sweetness and constancy to life. The soft focus blend of regret and desire. It is light of flapping garments that sets it beyond any other illumination. Even a simple object lying by chance in such a light, can only be used for counting and forward direction. There is an intelligible geometry to such a light, lying by chance but cannot be used for precise accounting.

Thanks to Bayo Akomolafe , Black Power Naps, Raquel Meseguer Zafe, and Sarah Jaffe. Soft Life is produced by Alana Chance and Axel Kacoutié with sound by Axel Kacoutié. I'm Leonora Manyangadze Senior Programmer for Somerset House Studios.

And do nothing else. A woman wraps around the light. Some of the first photographs of the river Niger were made, it reckons the higher numbers by twenties. Here is the twilight world of incantation. He thought he could hand on his image more beautifully, thus 40 is two twenties, a manipulation of a certain sort of light and a loved photograph rather than a wooden statue and 60 is three twenties, her images defined a certain space, a soft focus blend of regret and desire.