2018
Performance, 18min.
See Something Suspicious explores how gestures of vigilance and mistrust shape movement through space. Drawing on choreographies and behaviors associated with suspicion—furtive glances, sudden stillness, altered posture—the performance evokes the atmosphere of a body on alert, navigating public environments marked by social tension.
The piece unfolds as a slow transition: from observing and scanning to embodying suspicion itself. This progression is mirrored in the spatial journey, which moves from the heart of a city to its margins, tracing how surveillance seeps from institutional contexts into everyday embodiment.
Developed through research into advice columns, neighborhood watch manuals, media portrayals of Eastern European immigration, public safety campaigns, and social media discourse, the work assembles a vocabulary of gestures informed by contemporary fear culture. These references shape the choreography and the affective tone of the piece.
Referencing the logic of the “See Something, Say Something” campaign, the performance questions the internalized policing of bodies and space. It asks: what does it mean to live in a culture of continuous suspicion? And how do these dynamics inscribe themselves into the ways we move, relate, and inhabit the world?
Documentation by Nick Thomas (video) and Tor Jonsson (photo)
Part of Tripping Autonomy, De Kroon (NL)
ari david 