What Still Holds

What Still Holds explores gestures of collective cooperation in contexts marked by ecological, economic, and symbolic pressures.

The project unfolds through video, photography, and performative traces, grounded in fieldwork conducted in Lomé, Togo. It reflects on the ordinary actions that sustain communities when systems become fragile.

Ecology is understood in an expanded sense, not limited to the natural environment but encompassing human relations, memories, informal economies, gestures of care, and the invisible infrastructures of daily life. Vernacular actions become ecologies of care, sustaining soil, bodies, families, narratives, and ways of being in the world. The project highlights modest practices that escape spectacle yet quietly support life.

Through collective activations, material traces, moving images, and carefully constructed sound, What Still Holds builds a sensitive cartography of cooperation. Duration, fatigue, waiting, and breath play central roles. The work is not about spectacular performance but about inhabiting the time necessary for a shared gesture. Viewers are invited into co-presence, feeling the weight and beauty of collective effort.

The project asks what it means “to hold” in a time of ecological and symbolic precarity. it reveals discreet forms of persistence, solidarity, and collective intelligence. Through these practices, What Still Holds proposes that ecology is not only scientific data or political discourse but a daily practice, a way of living with others, human and more-than-human, in a world continuously repaired, maintained, and reimagined.