What happens when you meet the Fast And Furious franchise with the panopticon? Imagine the underground, neon vibes of Tokyo Drift with the fuzzy analogue of CCTV cameras – that’s what the Málaga-based studio Free Practice has done with Nike’s new campaign Infinite Drift, which sits somewhere between underground car meet, art film, and high-speed graphic experiments. It’s a visceral exploration of motion, identity, and design to match and coincide with the launch of the Nike AirMax DN8.
Free Practice’s concept brings together eight Serbian drift drivers, eight custom-built cars, and eight international illustrators, who transformed each vehicle into a moving portrait of its driver. The studio paired each driver with an artist, such as Ram Han, Jonathan Castro and Gustavo Eandi – who created bespoke car liveries inspired by interviews and insights into the drivers’ personalities and styles behind the wheel. The team also created a film, directed by Henrik Alm and photographed by Gabriela Alatorre.
At the centre of the campaign, the twin ideas of beauty and burn were explored. In beauty, there is rituals of care, motor aesthetics, reflective car bodies, effortless drift dances, and cinematic night rides – with burn, there is sensorial overload, aggression, power, smoke, petrol and screaming engines. “Within this conceptual framework, the director and photographer then set about to capture the cars, atmosphere and energy from both micro and macro lenses to find the tension of beauty and burn in each shot,” says Free Practice. Every still in the series is obscured in the smoke of melted rubber on the tarmac, long exposures and heat maps show giant etchings into the earth created by the blistering cars and their manoeuvres. A rough masculinity is paired with the muscularity of racing machines, creating a unique eroticism rendered by the grit and grime of images that look like they’re straight from the queer thriller Titane.