Conversation with the Roots

Mass surveillance, omnipresent in our contemporary societies, raises crucial questions about collective and individual responsibility in the act of observing and being observed. Beautiful Roots, a social art piece created in San Francisco in 2014 with the community of the French-American International School, embodies this interrogation by staging an immersive performance where the audience becomes both actor and witness.

Conversation With The Roots, an experimental performance presented in 2015 at the San Francisco International Arts Festival, stands at the intersection of social practice and metatheater. This project, conceived in response to its immediate environment, questions the dynamics of gaze and control by integrating the active participation of the audience in the construction of the artwork. The installation aligns with the festival’s theme, "Bearing Witness: Surveillance in the Age of the Drone," co-curated by Hanna Regev and Matt McKinley, aiming to raise collective awareness of the implications of pervasive surveillance in both public and private spaces.

The installation is based on fluid interaction between performers and spectators, materialized through the movement of textiles. These textiles, manipulated together, become a symbol of the interweaving of individual and collective perceptions. By provoking constant structural modifications, the setup forces participants to adjust their own perspectives, thus reproducing the fluidity and unpredictability of mutual observation. This perpetual transformation of space and human relationships reflects the elusive nature of surveillance power, which manifests both through technological devices and internalized social behaviors.

Beyond a mere aesthetic experience, the performance raises a fundamental ethical question: to what extent are we complicit in the surveillance system that surrounds us? By offering the public the opportunity to directly influence the form and perception of the installation, Conversation With the Roots engages a reflection on shared responsibility in the production and consumption of images, as well as in the consent to be seen and to see.

This collective meditation, by creating tension between control and freedom, invites an active awareness of the role each person plays in the dynamics of mass surveillance. Far from merely denouncing it, it opens a space for questioning and dialogue, confronting spectators with their own paradoxes and ethical choices in a world where the act of seeing becomes inseparable from that of being seen.

Conversation With The Roots

Cowell Theater, Fort Mason 

Performers: Florentina Mocanu, Amy Munz, Nathalie Brilliant, Val Sinckler, Tonyanna Borkovi, Latifa Medjdoub

Sound art:  Derek Phillips

Music: Haco

Time-based video art: David Schendel.