Soft Boy

About this title

The nonlinear video follows a group of uniformed, school-aged adolescents as they perform a series of rituals drawn from the artist’s memories of his days at an all-boys Catholic school. Schoolyard brawling, marching in military-style parades, arm wrestling, performative athleticism: the depicted actions index a type of masculinity largely governed by violence. Soldi’s treatment, however, frames the boys’ machismo as both threatening and absurd, barely concealing an urgent need for intimacy and connection.