This project begins with a fundamental question: how does populism conceal its true position and manipulate publics through gestures that imply trust? Populist actions rarely present themselves as direct aggression. They often arrive in familiar, benign forms—a handshake, a smile, a verbal assurance of alignment. Yet these gestures may simultaneously encode duplicity.

During electoral campaigns, handshakes between politicians and citizens are staged performances: silent, ritualized, and intended to communicate empathy, solidarity, and credibility. Crossed Fingers interrogates this familiar gesture by inserting a concealed element of deception. The crossing of fingers—traditionally a symbol of luck—is sewn into the inner palm of a glove, invisible in a conventional handshake. The action literalizes the metaphorical “hidden agenda” behind gestures of trust, making tangible what is usually abstract: the disjunction between appearance and political intention.

By materializing duplicity in the form of the glove, the work foregrounds the body as a site where performance, ideology, and concealment intersect. The project situates a minor, almost imperceptible detail at the center of analysis, transforming a routine social gesture into a lens for examining hypocrisy, double standards, and political manipulation. In this sense, the handshake is not only a communicative act but also a performative medium through which power and deceit are enacted.