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‘An Apology to Elephants’
2019
Medium: Archival video footage
Voice over: Jamie Serow
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 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 eight 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.
Length: 4 minutes 26 seconds
Anna Parisi
(b. 1984) is a Brooklyn-based interdisciplinary artist born in Brazil. She received a BA in Communications and Filmmaking from the Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio) and an MFA in Fine Arts from Parsons, The New School of Design in New York. Her work has been presented in Brazil, The United States, and Switzerland. She is the recipient of the Taller Creative Capital (2020) and has been recently nominated for the AICAD Post-Graduate Teaching Fellowship (2020). Anna has recently presented her work at The Anya and Andrew Shiva Gallery at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, The Hunter East Harlem Art Gallery, La Galleria La Mama, UrbanGlass, The Bureau of General Services—Queer Division and The Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Community Center, Smack Mellon, Wesbeth Gallery, Artigo Rio, Musée D’Elysee in Lausanne, and has work selected for the upcoming exhibition at the EFA Project Space. Anna explores ideas around racism, colonialism, and patriarchy with her identity as a context. She currently lives between Rio de Janeiro, New York, and Turin.