Developed in the aftermath of COVID-19, In This Time I Reflect responds to a period in which screens, QR codes and physical distance had radically altered how people encountered one another and navigated public space.
Four posters were installed across Brixton, each containing a QR code leading to a short performance by Dino Desica. Rather than entering a theatre or gallery, the audience encountered the work accidentally while moving through the city. Scanning an anonymous code created an immediate shift from the public environment of the street to the private space of the viewer’s phone.
Borrowing the graphic language of IKEA instruction manuals, the posters mimic systems designed to tell us clearly what to do. Instead, they lead towards performances that are playful, ambiguous and deliberately less functional.
The work uses this contradiction to examine how quickly behaviours introduced through necessity become ordinary. The same device used to order food, check information or navigate pandemic restrictions becomes a means of encountering a body performing on a screen.
In This Time I Reflect creates a tension between proximity and distance, public and private, physical and digital presence, asking what happens to performance when the encounter can take place anywhere, last only a few minutes, and disappear again into the movement of the city.
Concept: Norman Mine
Performance: Dino Desica
Posters / video: Norman Mine
Location: Brixton, South London
