Santiago Sierra: The Maelström

In The Maelström (2023), Santiago Sierra works with young football players from Tallinding United in Serrekunda, Gambia, who perform a sequence of movements based on the positions imposed by police during arrests. Repeated and linked together, these gestures form a collective choreography in which individual bodies become part of a recurring pattern of control and submission. The participants’ faces remain unseen, turning their bodies into anonymous figures and drawing attention to the mechanisms through which power disciplines movement and restricts individual freedom.

The work incorporates a fragment of a controversial 2022 speech by Josep Borrell, then High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, in which he described Europe as a “garden” and much of the rest of the world as a “jungle”. Set against the images filmed in Gambia, this metaphor highlights the division between those perceived as deserving protection and those regarded as a threat. Through the repetition of gestures and language, Sierra examines the relationship between violence, authority and exclusion, questioning the systems that define the boundaries between inclusion and marginalisation.