“When we see us
I will be so black that when I open my eyes you will think it’s a lighthouse.
When we see us
my teeth will be so white they will blind you when I smile.
When we see us
I will be so black that me standing here
still
will black you all.
                                                                                            YEAH!”

This chant does not introduce a performance.
It interrupts an exhibition.

Freddy’s Becoming Tree unfolds inside When We See Us at Liljevalchs, announced as a performance. (1)
Not mediation.
Not guidance disguised as care.
But a body entering an exhibition already saturated with Black representation.

When a movement artist enters a museum, he does not only move a body.
He rearranges distance, redirects attention.
He produces perspective as a choreographic decision.




Positionality is not neutral.

I read this work as choreography, because everything that follows is structured through choice.

Freddy positions his body beside a painting, between us and the work, in the middle of the room.
These are compositional decisions.

This choice of positionality leaks to the audience:

Where you stand.
Which artwork aligns with his body.
Which image absorbs his voice.

Perspective is not granted.
It is negotiated.

Choreography here operates not only through movement, but also through the organization of attention.
Dramaturgy becomes positioning.
Positioning becomes the work... The trunk of the tree




Language as root:
                      Fluency is not the measure.

Freddy does not arrive alone.
He carries family photographs developed in Benin.
A wooden comb.
Objects placed in a transparent bag.

They are not explained.
They are not authenticated by the exhibition, nor do they authenticate it.

They coexist.

This coexistence repeats across the performance: languages, temporalities, spiritual registers.
For diasporic bodies, coexistence is not a metaphor.
It is a practice.

When a song in Fon (2) enters the room, the voice arrives before meaning.
Before translation.
Before explanation.

Language here does not function as communication.
It does not stabilize identity.
It operates as an attachment, not fluency.

Roots do not ask permission.
They grow anyway, even when they cannot be fully named.

French arrives later,
a prayer: partial, worn.
Half called to memory.
Half that does not fully return.

In front of a painting of baptism in the sea (3), institutional religion appears without resolution.
Ancestral practice is present without declaration.

These spiritual registers share the room without reconciliation.

This is not harmony.
It is proximity.




The paintings look back

A body moving in space claims time the paintings cannot control.
Yet the paintings do not dissolve into the background
At times they frame his body, at times they resist it, confront it.

A painting asks: Who Are We and Where Are We Going? (4)
The longer one looks, the less stable the answer becomes.
Hyper clarity inside large uncertainty.

Beside it: women warriors of Benin. (5)
The future-facing question meets a past that refuses to stay behind.

The call does not come from ahead.
It comes from underneath.

Freddy adjusts.
Sometimes as commentary.
Sometimes as a contrast.

Fon returns, this time visibly embodied.
Not explanation, but continuation.

Sound moves through the body, not toward the audience.
Memory appears without archive.
Spoken partially.
Imperfectly.
Without mastery.

Not heritage performed for recognition, but memory in circulation.

Body to image.
Image to memory.
Memory to voice.
Voice to space.

What happens when a body carries a language it cannot fully command?
When inheritance exceeds fluency?




Masculinity breaks form

In front of two painted portraits of Black men (6), the room shifts.

The voice lowers.
The body softens.
The floor receives.

Not submission.
Not collapse.

A refusal of the choreography assigned to Black masculinity.

Vulnerability is not confession.
It is practice.

A Black male body allowed rest.
Allowed softness.
Allowed contradiction.

Black, body, rest.
Black, body, fold.
Black, body, hold.

The text fractures because the body does.
This moment risks sentimentality.
It also risks refusal.
The work does not protect us from either reading.




The corridor

A narrow passage.
Eyes withheld.
Light touches only what it needs.
The body dissolves into fabric and shadow.
A door.
We do not enter.

This moment does not belong to the exhibition, and that is precisely its force.

It withdraws.

Glissant's (7) echoes go unnamed;
Opacity appears not as refusal but as protection from the violence of legibility.

Not everything this text is blacked out is fully known.
Not everything that is known needs to be said.




WE

The exhibition is titled When We See Us.
The “we” hovers.
Generous in tone.
Selective in practice.

Freddy asked: whose stories are told, and what stories?

The question I extend: Who does this “we” require work from?

The “we” expands because someone agrees to carry it.
To translate.
To soften.
To bridge.




Proximity under pressure

Becoming Tree stretches the role of the movement artist: performer, facilitator, tutor, witness. A stretch that carries risk.

Freddy positions his body - and his stories - in the space between artwork and audience, attempting to close what the
institution leaves open: the un-curated gap.

Proximity appears generous.
It also carries weight.

But what authority is accumulated - or traded - when a body is asked to guide the “we”?
Who benefits when closeness replaces distance?
When artists are invited to guide us through a “we,” who is relieved of responsibility?




Position (not conclusion)

This text is not a conclusion.
not an evaluation.
not a verdict.

It stands beside the work.
Close enough to feel
Distant enough to let it remain unresolved.

Becoming Tree does not ask to be understood.
It asks to be positioned.
It is a structure of coexistence. not a timeline.

The question remains - and should remain -.

When we are invited closer,
what are we being asked to notice?

When closeness becomes a curatorial strategy,
who is still (allowed to) disappear?

And what, precisely,
are we being trained
not
to see?

1. The work is a performance, announced publicly by the artist as “Performative guided walk.”
2. A Niger–Congo language spoken mainly in southern Benin by the Fon people. one of the major languages in Benin.
3. Sthembiso Sibisi, Baptism: Spiritual Healing in the Sea, 2005.
4. Mmapula Mmakgabo Helen Sebidi, Who we are and where are we going? 2004-2008.
5. Cyprien Tokoudagba, Série le Roi part en guerre, 2005.
6. Elladj Lincy Deloumeaux, La sincérité d’une promesse & À mes yeux, 2022.
7. Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, For Opacity, 1990.

BIO: Mohamed “Shika” Saleh is a dance artist of Nubian origin, born in Egypt and based in Stockholm. His practice moves between choreographic work, performance, and embodied research, shaped by Afro and Afro-diasporic movement practices and musicality. Trained at Cairo Contemporary Dance Center and École des Sables in Senegal, he currently works with Cullberg. Alongside dance, Shika works with photography, video, and painting, shaping how he approaches looking, framing, and attention. His writing develops from proximity to dance as a situated and relational practice.