« How can those pathetic liberals say that apartheid will still be around in thirty to forty years? Don’t realise that that shows just how little they are willing to do, that they don’t give a damn? »
Raw-nerved, Tracey Rose is quick to flare up. Her anger rises in waves, before immediately subsiding into peals of laughter. She does not carry just her country’s history in her genes. « Apartheid never stopped people from seeing each other and fucking; I’m the living proof« , she laughs. Mixed-race, the descendant of « European trash » as she calls her Scottish great-great grandfather, at 27 years old she also carries the burden of a weighty past: memories of a little girl sent to a white school, a universe where she above all learnt to despise herself.
In one of her first memorable performances, she appeared entirely naked and shaved in a glass cage, busily knitting all her body hair together. In the background were the testimonies of mixed-race people speaking about their status. Neither black nor white, Tracey Rose is a woman. Which is a big handicap in a society of « cowboys » that she considers just as macho whether black or white. « Women get breast cancer from their broken hearts« , she insists. Her last installation, presented at the Venice Biennale in June 2001, showed a film called Ciao Bella in three dimensions. In it, Tracey Rose simultaneously plays all the roles, incarnating twelve half-puppet, half-doll women characters dressed in multicoloured paper and dustbin liners. In addition to Lolita, the young sex kitten, and Islama, the veiled Muslim, she also plays Saartje Baartman, the Hottentot Venus exhibited in Europe at the beginning of the twentieth century for the size of her bottom, and Mermaid the African, who, although alternately asleep or silent, turns out to be the central character in this farce
With her Afro hairdo and bag of chips, Mermaid impassively watches the other women’s mimics, tailor-made answers, songs, and final convulsions, before herself ending up in a crucifix pose, a dab of ketchup in each hand, in reference to a ketchup-splattered joke in Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction, a nod to her gay friends, and two fingers up at the South Africa of churches and stadiums. Not only is God black, but Jesus Christ was a woman too
///Article N° : 5512
