No Such Thing As Rest: A Walk with Brian Massumi

Performance Matters, 2013, DVD, 73 mins

Trade Orders: Central Books, see our Distribution page for more information

In this relaxed but intensive exchange Massumi discusses the nature of events, their sensuous and affective forces, immaterial art practices and their critical potential under capitalism, belief and hope and their relation to political agency. Charged ideas are quietly elaborated against a vibrant, restless backdrop of everyday life.

Brian Massumi is the author of major works in contemporary philosophy including Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation and Semblance and Event: Activist Philosophy and the Occurrent Arts. He is also the translator of significant works of French philosophy including Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus, Jean-François Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition, and Jacques Attali’s Noise.

Contains an accompanying booklet Movements of Thought.

“Capturing thought in the moving image is notoriously difficult. To witness thinking itself is to make something very different from the standard ‘in conversation’, however acclaimed the speaker. Performance Dialogues face this challenge head-on. A series really without precedent, it seeks to present ideas in action, as they unfold in the key sites of their hugely influential protagonists – city apartment, house-museum, contested street. Poised between intellectual narrative and place-work, each film finds a distinctive style and a language suitable to its subject, while remaining always engaged, empathetic and concerned, finally, with the most pressing business: how to live in such times.“
​Gareth Evans, Film Curator, 2013

No Such Thing As Rest was premiered at Whitechapel Gallery, London on 31 October 2013.

Watch the trailer below.

No Such Thing As Rest Trailer from Live Art Development Agency on Vimeo.

Directed and Edited by Hugo Glendinning and Adrian Heathfield

Director of Photography: Hugo Glendinning

Sound: Noémie Solomon

Research and Production: Louisa Martin

Post Production Assistant: Lucy Beech

Part of the Crossovers series of artists’ films, documentaries and dialogues reflecting the potential of marginal artforms and intense ideas within popular media.