BATTLESHIFT, 2024

Description

Battleshift, 2024

In Battleshift, Langford examines the demands of leading in isolation: finding one’s footing while circumstances continue to shift. At its center is a boy learning to distinguish a necessary change in direction from the fear that he has lost his way.

Life arrives in fragments, exceeding what he can anticipate or arrange. His desire for a complete map meets the immediate responsibility of keeping his vessel moving. Each choice becomes a point of contact with his own agency; each consequence reveals something about the person holding the oar.

Within Langford’s inquiry into selfhood, the pivot becomes an act of preservation. The boy develops practices that allow him to adjust without abandoning himself. What emerges is an understanding that he must care for the person who will remain after each upheaval: himself. His passage depends as much on learning how to sustain that person as on deciding where to go.