Video by Sebastian Hernandez in collaboration with Brenda Guevara to the song Big Fire by Elysia Crampton
Brown Zero is about me.
Brown Zero is a meditation on my body and the complex matrix that attempts to hone in on my identity. This video serves to complicate, blur and allow my identity to be a fluid and layered mélange of visual aesthetics speaking to my body's relationships to them. For this piece I searched through the people's archive, YouTube, for visual textures and time specific documentations. I searched through endless video documentations of cumbia dance parties in Mexico City (formerly known as Distrito Federal), where my parents were born and raised, as well as personal documentations of vogue balls ranging from the 80's to the 90's. One of the several intersecting ideas I put forward with making this video piece was my notion of the dance floor as a utopian place which flourishes within an oppressive patriarchal hegemony.
This piece with its meditative fruitfulness, allowed me to mourn, celebrate and inquire on my body's current condition as it tries to digest the superfluous tragedies that have recently occurred and continue to happen; simultaneously feeling the past, the present and the future. This video is dedicated to myself, the 49 brown queers at Pulse nightclub, indigenous people, Los Angeles, Mexican resistance groups who have died at the hands of the state and the countless black and brown bodies who have unjustly lost their lives to the hands of an oppressive system that effects us and whom by nearly existing gets in the way of its procession.
Brown Zero is a meditation on my body and the complex matrix that attempts to hone in on my identity. This video serves to complicate, blur and allow my identity to be a fluid and layered mélange of visual aesthetics speaking to my body's relationships to them. For this piece I searched through the people's archive, YouTube, for visual textures and time specific documentations. I searched through endless video documentations of cumbia dance parties in Mexico City (formerly known as Distrito Federal), where my parents were born and raised, as well as personal documentations of vogue balls ranging from the 80's to the 90's. One of the several intersecting ideas I put forward with making this video piece was my notion of the dance floor as a utopian place which flourishes within an oppressive patriarchal hegemony.
This piece with its meditative fruitfulness, allowed me to mourn, celebrate and inquire on my body's current condition as it tries to digest the superfluous tragedies that have recently occurred and continue to happen; simultaneously feeling the past, the present and the future. This video is dedicated to myself, the 49 brown queers at Pulse nightclub, indigenous people, Los Angeles, Mexican resistance groups who have died at the hands of the state and the countless black and brown bodies who have unjustly lost their lives to the hands of an oppressive system that effects us and whom by nearly existing gets in the way of its procession.
Skin, 2015
GREEN RED ARROZ from Sebastian on Vimeo.
Mural Wall Pt. 2 from Sebastian on Vimeo.