Riders Between Cities

I first came across @activeyayah while looking for people to document in London. I’d messaged a few riders and Yayah was one of the people who got back to me.

The footage he sent over was simple. Riding through London, mostly on one wheel, with different people coming in and out along the way. Some of the riders around him were connected to CSI (Combo Swerve International), including @csi.will. I’m still not sure whether Yayah is actually part of CSI himself, but he rides with a lot of the same people.

I put together a short video for the reels tab from what he sent me and it ended up getting a lot more attention than I expected.

Not long after the video went up, @csi.jordan got back to a message I’d sent earlier. I’d originally come across Jordan separately, but by then the connection between the riders was becoming more noticeable.

Jordan had recently moved to Liverpool. We spoke about making something together and he ended up documenting some riding in town. The setting had changed from London to Liverpool, but the riding and some of the connections surrounding it hadn’t.

CSI (Combo Swerve International) kept appearing through different people rather than something I had deliberately gone looking for. One rider would lead to another, sometimes in a different city, with the same names and connections appearing around them.

I still don’t know or understand the full structure of CSI, and that’s probably not the point of these photographs either. What interested me was seeing how something can stretch between places through the people involved in it.

What started as looking for some more photographs and footage in London ended up introducing another small network within the archive.