TEXT YOUNES EL OUAFIQ
This is FLOAT ON — not a song, but a moment of surrender. The music opens like water. Sumaya’s voice arrives through the hush, intimate and unhurried, a prayer whispered to oneself. Behind her words, the rhythm of cities — Tunis, Port-au-Prince, New York — converges in the still breath between confession and faith.
“My lyrics are deeply inspired by my upbringing,” Sumaya says. “Family, Islam, resistance — they’re the threads that hold everything together.” Her latest work, 1446, follows the same pulse: songs written like journal entries, where faith becomes geography and home exists wherever the spirit finds calm.
When Blasian Womack first heard FLOAT ON, he imagined a park bench under the soft flicker of streetlight — a place where quiet felt infinite. From that vision, the 1495 collective began to build a world in black and white, moving between motion and pause. Every frame breathes. Every silence has weight.
Beside Sumaya is Saluma Bensalim, Moroccan creative producer and visual architect of FLOAT ON. She recalls how the fruit found its way into the frame. “In the Qur’an, fruits are signs of divine generosity. They remind us that even in solitude, God continues to nourish us.”
Together, Sumaya and Saluma craft a language that feels both ancient and new — born from displacement but anchored in belonging. Their collaboration, guided by the women-led 1495 collective, turns creation into communion.
FLOAT ON continues — its melody rising, dissolving, returning. The song does not demand to be understood; it invites stillness. In that stillness, identity rests. “Art pushes culture forward,” Sumaya reflects. “We reconcile our upbringing as New Yorkers with the cultures of our parents.”
In that reconciliation, FLOAT ON becomes sacred — a vessel between faith and form, heritage and horizon. To float is not to drift, but to trust. To release. To be carried. And as the final note fades, the fruit on the table remains — untouched, radiant, eternal.
Photography Reneé Simone & Stephanie Rodriguez – Directed Blasian Womack – Performed Sumaya Nazar – Produced 1495 Collective – Creative Production Saluma Bensalim – Art Direction Renée Simone – Cinematography Blasian Womack – Lighting Stanley Ligon, Chykeem Nichols – Sound ZANE, Miles Krieger – Studio GUM Studios, New York