I Believe in the Future of Small Countries

Derrick Woods-Morrow’s I Believe in the Future of ‘Small Countries’ is a wet performance. The gallery becomes a shoreline you can taste: unstable, slick, a place where desire runs through memory and myth until everything drips together. Sand grinds beneath his feet, rattled loose by sound, by bass, by the weight of breath. Woods-Morrow calls the crowd to be islands, a scatter of bodies swelling into an archipelago. They moan back in call and response until the room sweats into a kind of orgy. The gallery is not a container; it is a belly, hot and tidal. Promiscuity is the grammar here. Refusal is its punctuation. Survival is sticky.

Fragments of film, sound, and text wash in like tides. They smell like ritual. They pull up the drowned—slaves lost to the ocean, queer bodies unspoken, lives swallowed whole. Their presence isn’t quiet; it’s horny, haunting, too much to contain. They press against the walls, against your skin, refusing domestication.

At moments Woods-Morrow stops, blindfolded, stripped down to a g-string, body sweating under the lights. He asks: Pick up a single grain of sand. Tell it your past. Tell it your future. Put it on your tongue. Swallow. Later: Take the palm oil soap. Wash the black from a coffee bean. Now bend down, wash your neighbor’s feet. The air hums with touch, with spit, with bodies moving closer than they should. His own body becomes altar and mouth, womb and demand, pulling pleasure in, pushing it back out, collective, soaked, opaque.

Time here is slippery—it bends, stutters, backs up, comes again. Desire is not clean. It leaks everywhere.

Glissant, Wynter, Brathwaite are in the water too, whispering with the tide. Woods-Morrow holds the coastline as wound and as threshold. As archive and as portal. I Believe in the Future of ‘Small Countries’ doesn’t dry anything out—it lets everything stay wet. It imagines small countries as swollen with Relation, desire, and refusal—futures dripping beyond empire’s reach.