Confinement Rap (2020)




A musical work which uses the language of the video clip to relate the confinement by Covid-19 with the situation of racialized people, queers and women.
The use of a popular form such as rap allows a political discourse to be presented in a direct and entertaining way. The camp aesthetic reflects my artistic background and the urban language of rap is reflected in the sequences recorded with security cameras in London during my project “You Have Been Watched” (2002).
All other sequences were recorded during lockdown with low resolution and in a homemade way, reflecting the limitations imposed by the state of emergency.

Freedom of movement exists, but only for a privileged few, and in the video, the forms of control that biopower exercises over other bodies are represented by the sequences where a security camera system records images of a group of transgender people who are being persecuted.
The video is also a reflection and analysis of my career as an artist and the languages that I have used over the years to represent the restrictions imposed on trans people. For this reason, I recorded some scenes with a paper theatre to refer to my first experiments with video installations in discos and galleries where I used cardboard boxes to create proto "virtual reality" scenarios in the early 1990´s.

This video was a finalist in the Dona´M Cine festival (Barcelona 2021) and was selected for the Cultura Online exhibition organised by the CCCC Carmen Centre of Contemporary Arts (Valencia, Spain) and is on their website and was on display in the museum.