A Video of Black African Child Being ‘Dehumanized’ in France an Art Work, Not True- PRNigeria Fact-Check Reveals
A viral video recently shared on social media platforms may have portrayed two white men and a woman urinating on a Black African Child. https://prnigeria.com/2023/09/07/white-men-pee-france/
But a fact-check by PRNigeria has however confirmed that the claim is not only misleading but utterly FALSE.
The video had gone viral among Nigerian audiences especially on Facebook, twitter and WhatsApp. It was also shared on a video site where a YouTuber captioned it “Outrage, white men and women urinating on a black woman”.
VIDEO LINK: https://youtu.be/UYUIyB6srYw?si=g8BTLNCJcwL4s8Py
The trending video accompanied with a text reading as follows: “This is the filth of France, the ugliest scandal of the twenty-first century!!! The inhuman and shocking scene of two men and a woman urinating on an African child, in one of the French villages, and the child, completely stripped of clothes, lying face down on the ground, while numbers of the French men and women, whose country has always shocked the world with the sophistication of their civilization, are watching this obscene, dirty, and abnormal act, without any sign of intervention from any of them!!!
“This was after the state of Mali expelled the French ambassador…. Africa must wake up to see the true, ugly face of France. We regret the ugliness and horror of the scene, but where are the human rights advocates in this? It is unfortunate that globally Black Africans are associated with misfortune everywhere”.
PRNigeria observed that the video which evokes a feeling of disgust, is spread in the face of growing resentment against France.
But after watching the video, PRNigeria fact-check team searched keywords and used reverse image tools to authenticate the veracity of the disturbing footage.
It was discovered that the widely circulated video was the work of Regina José Galindo, a performance artist titled “Piedra” to draw the attention to the suffering of Latin America women.
In a 2013 performance entitled Piedra, artist Regina José Galindo walked into an audience and positioned her body, completely covered with black coal, in a petrified fetal position on the ground.
Every 10 minutes, a male-bodied “audience member” would approach Galindo, unbutton their pants and proceed to pee on her as she remained deathly still. The obvious nonchalant attitude and ease in which these male-bodied actors could defile the artist’s body parallels the wide-spread apathy regarding the safety and care of women’s bodies.
The public aspect of the performance only further underscores the myopic nature of everyday actions that propel repetitive structural violence. In presenting her body as an insignificant piedra (Spanish for stone) Galindo suggests a quality of disposability.
She equates the female body to a stone in their vulnerability to violent enactments. More specifically, her work comments on the violence that is particularly prevalent in Galindo’s homeland of Guatemala and addresses the exploitation of the female workers of Brazil’s colossal coal mining industry.
The piece, simple yet highly theoretical, aims to expose a history of violence, especially towards Latin American women, far beyond a local level.
The fact-check concluded that: “PRNigeria discovered that the claim was originally a theoretical work of art by Regina José Galindo, a Brazilian performance artist titled “Piedra” meant to underscores the myopic nature of everyday actions that propel repetitive structural violence and suffering undergone by Latin America women”.
