INSTALLATION / PERFORMANCE /FILM
BY CELESTE ROGOSIN
2021

“If what we can perceive with our senses delimits what is politically possible, then how do we make legible forms of power that are invisible?
How can we imagine ourselves out of a box that we don’t even know we’re stuck inside?”
Jackie Wang, Carcercal Capitalism.

Clear Jail Minotaur is an installation and performance organised around a mask in the collection of the Musée Royal de l’Afrique Centrale in Tervuren, Belgium. Reproduced in Murano glass and fitted with sensors, the mask acts on a sound composition that interlaces and weaves together the discourses of thinkers, prisoners and musicians on the subject of confinement. The Minotaur is a central, ambiguous figure in Greek mythology. He represents the instinctive, animal part of man, but he is also a prisoner of the maze and carries the stigmata of his birth. 

Clear Jail Minotaur is a reflection on the figure of the contemporary prisoner caught in the trap of the technologies of ubiquity and in the tyranny of transparency. In the current situation, with inequalities heightened by the global pandemic, technology in the ascendant, and identity and racial issues still acute, the Minotaur is a figure that, sadly, is constantly proving its relevance. To accept its mask could be a way of re-enchanting by the body the irreducibility of our desire for freedom.