Ricerche: two, a work-in-progress by Sharon Hayes

When this video is complete, it will be the third in Hayes’s ongoing series called Ricerche, Italian for “research.” In each installment, Hayes interviews groups of people in outdoor spaces, a structure she has borrowed from the Italian filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini, who used it in the 1963 film Comizi d’Amore to explore people’s views of sex and sexuality. In the first Ricerche video, Hayes interviewed a group of students at an all-women’s college, and the second gathered together children of queer and gender-nonconforming parents. Hayes expands on Pasolini’s approach and brings it into the present, creating intimate, detailed, and at times heated examinations of collective identification.

What emerges in all three of Hayes’s Ricerche works is that collective identity is never singular or unified, but rather shifts within larger political contexts. Ricerche: two was filmed just weeks before the World Health Organization declared the outbreak of COVID-19 a pandemic, and before the current global uprisings against systemic racism. Within our current moment, I find it especially moving to see these powerful athletes in close proximity and joyfully owning their own strength. Hayes’s work-in-progress poses urgent questions about how we might talk and move with fearlessness and pleasure as we address the future together.