In 2004 I moved to the United Kingdom to study art at the University for Creative Arts. There I discovered the video “Dancing in Peckham” by British artist Gilliam Wearing, which was being shown at the South London Gallery at the time.

This piece shows the artist dancing alone inside a shopping center in Peckham. Her movements change style, perhaps as the sounds in her head shift. According to Wearing herself, she was inspired by seeing a woman dancing—similarly to how she dances in the video—alone and completely arrhythmically at a jazz concert. I remember being completely mesmerized by this piece, created in 1994. The video, filmed in broad daylight, raises many mysteries: Why is she dancing? What inner music might she be creating? What are the people passing by thinking?

Back in 2020, during a visit to London after passing through the same Peckham shopping center with a dancer friend, Carolina de Santiago couldn't resist taking out her phone and recreating that irreverent gesture, which captivated her in her youth and which resonates again today because of the weight it raises regarding why a body dancing in the street isn't also a way of being in the world. Perhaps this modest revival reaffirms that intention to inhabit public space through small political gestures that disrupt the natural order of things.