Soft-Touch
Soft-Touch (2025) is an audiovisual installation developed from a collection of writing that explores notions of emotion and intimacy within socio-political and institutional contexts.
The work was devised from a text that draws on various sources concerned with affect, emotion, and, in particular, the ideas of softness and surfaces within both personal and socio-political frameworks. The textual foundation of Soft-Touch, which informs the installation, was shaped by and sometimes directly drawn from my own essays, alongside a range of references, most notably Sara Ahmed’s The Cultural Politics of Emotion, and specifically the chapter ‘The Contingency of Pain’.
In researching how emotion is harnessed and utilised within political contexts, and how, although it is often associated with humane or embodied approaches, it can also be instrumentalised to bind individuals to collectives in ways that incite fear of the ‘other’, I began to work directly with the idea of surfaces, and with skin as a boundary that is susceptible to collision with what lies outside it.
This formed the basis of the conceptual framework behind Soft-Touch, from which I moved further into examining queer feminist theories, particularly those present in literature. I built on earlier work surrounding autotheory and performance, turning to texts such as Sianne Ngai’s Ugly Feelings as I considered tangibility, slippage, and stickiness in writing.
The metaphor of ‘soft-touch’ suggests that the nation’s borders and defences are like skin; they are soft, weak, porous and easily shaped or even bruised by the proximity of others.
— Ahmed, p. 2
We need to remember the ‘press’ in impression. It allows us to associate the experience of having an emotion with the very affect of one surface upon another, an affect that leaves its mark or trace.
— Ahmed, p. 6
