The performance walk “The Boy Who Cried Wolf” is based on the tale of John Hookham Frere. The tale concerns a shepherd boy who repeatedly tricks nearby villagers into thinking wolves are attacking his flock. When a wolf actually does appear and the boy again calls for help, the villagers believe that it is another false alarm and the sheep are eaten by the wolf. In later English-language poetic versions of the fable, the wolf also eats the boy.

“The Boy Who Cried Wolf” is a performance where I walked from the multicultural neighbourhood, Nørrebro, to the Danish parliament in the centre of Copenhagen. During the walk, I used a megaphone and shouted “The wolf is coming”—a reference to John Hookham Frere’s tale.

The wolf is a metaphor of migration and the fear of the unknown. Therefore, the performance walk ended in the Danish National Parliament where several laws against migration have been and are being signed.

During the walk, people approached me to ask who the wolf was. Some of them even joined and shouted with me. At the end, someone called the police who came and asked about the purpose of the action. Was it a demonstration or a performance? When organizing a demonstration, you need special permission, but if you are doing a performance, no permit is needed, so all was fine.

With this performance I want to reflect on the fear of the unknown, considering migration and the colonial history of the place where I come from, Colombia, and the place where I currently live, Denmark.

The performance happened on the day when Christopher Columbus initiated the colonialization of America and the biggest genocide in human history. The “Taínos” in the Dominican Republic opened their arms to the Spanish conquerors, and they were the first indigenous community to have contact with the Spanish. In response, the conquerors raped, tortured, killed, and erased their whole culture. Nowadays, other groups of humans travel the world, escaping war, hunger, inequality, with no other attempt than looking for better places to live.