Motricity and Desire

High school sophomores or 16th-century saints? Sam Contis’s recent exhibition captures the unmediated facial expressions of runners at the finish line.

By Lindsey A. FreemanMarch 30, 2026

• Art & Architecture

• Sports

THE GUN GOES OFF. Why do we start this way?

We have gotten so used to violence, or its specter, in everything. With the shot, an impulse reaction and a surge of adrenaline: The first runner sets off. It is dusk, and the number 365 is safety-pinned to her maroon singlet. Her body is time, so is mine, so is yours.

Although we see only her at first, the style of the singlet signifies that she does not run alone—she is part of a team. As we register this fact, the gun goes off again. It is morning, and another runner gets going. She is pushing down the same landscape as the first runner, with her feet in the tension envelopes that are her shoes. The legs are turning over. We don’t see them; we hear their messages in her footfalls. The Appalachian landscape reads her efforts and stores them like old letters in a drawer.

The fact that this is common doesn’t make it any easier or any less beautiful. Every day, so many people are setting off like this, prepared to do something hard. The gun goes off a third time. It is afternoon, and another runner begins. We don’t know it yet, but this will be the last time we hear the starter pistol in Sam Contis’s film Five Kilometers (2025).

When the three channels of the film come together, the runners form a set of likenesses that amplify differences when we pay attention. Each runner in her own kinesphere, filling her own screen, offers a unique invitation to a new attunement and another way of showing that the poetry of running is not simply about masochism and virtue. The desire to run hard like this is much weirder and more mysterious.

Contis’s film shows how in the pink heat of every race, things start to shift. We see each runner try to keep her momentum and then fight to hang on. This requires subtle adjustments of hips or feet, dropping of the shoulders, maybe with carefully rehearsed phrases repeating in the mind, and the peculiar disposition to take pain and shove it down and keep holding it there, like trying to drown something underwater until it’s near enough to the end of the race that it’s safe to let it bob up to the surface. Only then can a runner allow the tang of their limit to keep them in check while still moving forward toward the finish line.

Five Kilometers brings us close so that we can see all of this in the runners’ faces, necks, and shoulders. We can also hear it in their breathing. There’s a moment when the film becomes aurally intense with the droning sound of all three runners at full lung capacity. The scene swells up to remind us that a running race is something that hits a multitude of senses—it is not only something to watch.

Then the wave of sound drops out, and the film briefly goes silent as each runner gets close to finishing her 5K. We no longer need the sound turned on because it is inside us now. We hear it without hearing it. Soon the sound of breathing, now ragged, now gasping from effort, returns to the film as, one by one by one, each runner kicks to the finish. Over 25 minutes, we bear witness to how the runners have tuned their bodies to balance effort and pace. We behold them as they ride the edge of themselves, striving for a lightness that is the inverse of what they are experiencing. Then we see them let go and begin to recover. This is their art.

The transition moment where the film ends is the subject of Phases (2025), a series of 24 black-and-white photographs of cross-country runners, recently exhibited at the American Academy of Arts and Letters in New York. The photographs are close-ups of faces of young runners contorted in pain from the agony of the end of a race, or the just-lessening grimaces of beginning to recover after crossing the finish line. Their eyes are looking up or closed as beads of sweat slide down their noses. Their mouths are open to the particular pleasures of chosen suffering. With this series, Contis illuminates the truth that every competitive runner learns to find the tender place inside themselves and then lets it be ripped to shreds through desire and effort.

Contis has been documenting and photographing this team of high school cross-country runners from Pennsylvania for seven years, but her familiarity with this scene goes deeper. She was a runner herself, and this was her team, but you don’t need to know this biographical detail to see that she knows what it means to run fleet and free along the boundary of the self. She knows the value of going until you touch something that takes you somewhere, either outside of the self or deeper inside, and she understands the draw of doing this again and again.

The temporal sense of duration also saturates Phases. In his meditation on time, George Herbert Mead describes the way we experience ourselves in time as “a continual sliding of presents into each other.” The repetition of discrete studies of desire in Contis’s photographs gives us another timescale to think with, one that shakes us out of the recency bias of contemporary culture and lets us move through presents that become difficult to time-stamp. The expressions of desire on the runners’ faces stretch us into a longue durée; they look as if they could belong to 16th-century saints or girls who just entered their sophomore year of high school. It is only the braces, braids, or piercing styles that alert us to the present or near-present moment.

Each photograph in this series flourishes as a pause in a durational flow of someone who has been caught wanting something, but who is not in the least bit embarrassed by being seen wanting. Each runner has moved through the tendency or even the ability to self-police or curate her affect. In this space of feeling created by Contis’s Phases, we remember what French philosopher Michel Serres wrote: “To inhabit your body better, forget it, at least in part.” Spending time with Contis’s work, we forget to wonder who is the fastest and how we might stack up. We forget to quantify, to compare. We are simply caught up in the affects of the aftermath of motricity and desire that the film and photographs project. In a time of incessant self-tracking, and when increased scrutiny is placed on girls in sports under bogus claims of protection, these are the kinds of images we need. They are an affirmation that even if we aren’t free everywhere, there are still places where young people can shake out their legs and let their desires run.

¤

Featured image: Sam Contis, installation view of Five Kilometers, 2025. American Academy of Arts and Letters, 2025. Photo: Steven Probert.