SUUTOO

Multidisciplinary artist SUUTOO’s world-building is not escape, but distortion and reorientation: an opening toward emancipatory errancies. Drawn to gestures that are both devotional and defiant, SUUTOO turns to myth as a tool for sense-making and undoing, tracing how symbolic language shapes internal and external realities. A poetics of the in-between. SUUTOO is a performer working through sound, poetry, performance, and visual material composing works which explore intimate and collective transformation. Engaging noise not just as sonic material but as a site of radical potential for alterity, eroticism, and fugitivity, SUUTOO blurs the boundaries between body, space, spirit, and sound.

HOW DOES YOUR SUBMITTED WORK RESPOND TO THE CIRCA 20:25 MANIFESTO?
THE STRIP is a fugitive choreography, a quiet vandalism of the everyday. Painted orange, moving through my hometown in stilettos and a grey mini dress, I become a strange flash against concrete monotony: a monument to what goes unseen. The piece explores being hyper-visible while also being rendered invisible through systems of marginalisation. What remains when one builds their own skin as armour, when alienation is no longer a condition to escape but a position to inhabit with intent? Each heel strike, a seismic refusal. THE STRIP embodies Refugia not as retreat but rupture: a reworlding through slowness, distortion, presence.

IF AWARDED THE £30,000 CIRCA PRIZE, WHAT 10-MINUTE WORK WOULD YOU CREATE – AND HOW WOULD IT EMBODY THE SPIRIT OF REFUGIA?
I would orchestrate a documented performance expanding on THE STRIP, set in London, this time not alone but as part of an army of comrades. Staining the city, drenched in bright orange: a procession of friction and slow-burning rage. This is not spectacle, but spell: myth-making in public space, becoming slow-motion monuments to ourselves. More than a film, it’s a shared process: shaped with my community through collaboration, rehearsal and conversation. An experiment in co-embodiment. A space held by risk, care and attunement. Refugia lives here too: in how we gather, how we listen, how we dream aloud.

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Funding for the CIRCA PRIZE is generated entirely by the #CIRCAECONOMY, a circular model that reinvests proceeds from affordable art sold on CIRCA.ART into new public art commissions, charitable causes, art education and prizes. Since launching in 2020, the initiative has raised over £1 Million, placing artists and communities at the centre of an economy that continually reinvests in the future of art and culture.

The CIRCA PRIZE 2025 winners will be revealed LIVE in Piccadilly Circus on Monday 13 October, with a special 30-minute award ceremony starting at 20:00 BST. Don’t miss it!