Anna Parisi
***Content warning - scenes of violence against humans and animals. ***
This piece was part of the exhibition "Against, Again: Art Under Attack in Brazil" that was to take place at Anya and Andrew Shiva Gallery inside the John Jay College of Criminal Justice from February 14th to April 3rd. Even though there was an opening, the show was shut down one week after its opening. www.annaparisi.site - Instagram @aluparisi
From the artist:
The work An Apology to Elephants (2019) is a video collage of found images and audio made as a comment on the escalation of violence against Black children and youth in Brazil. In the span of four minutes, Parisi creates an association between racialized bodies and the bodies of elephants, both being disciplined and chased. Through this relationship, the artist questions the human and non-human binary at the same time denouncing dehumanization practices inflicted on these bodies by disciplinary agents. While the viewer sees scenes of trainers punishing elephants’ bodies, images of police action in Brazilian favelas reveal a glimpse of the violence that befalls on these communities. The video ends with the voice of a grandfather to one of the most recent victims of police action in Rio’s communities. In September 2019, at the Conjunto de Favelas do Alemão, Ágatha Vitória Sales Félix, only 8 years old, was shot multiple times on her back inside a van while the police aimed at drivers of a motorcycle nearby. The police justified the action by claiming there was an armed conflict going on, but Agatha’s family contested these allegations. Although violence in favelas has become a persistent topic in the media for decades now, with the rise of extremist right-wing federal and state governments, police violence has intensified. Rio’s current governor, Wilson Witzel, has made the news for flying on a police helicopter shooting randomly down at favelas and its communities. An Apology to Elephants also remains as a gloomy parallel between the Brazilian context and the killing of Black bodies in the US, pointing to how structural racism and genocide operate according to similar patterns of power.
Year: 2019
Medium: Archival video footage
Voice over: Jamie Serow
Length: 4 minutes 26 seconds