Tracey Rose
WhoreMoans, MEGLADONN & Lassoing with the Postcolonial Gauchos (2017)
This video in three chapters, commissioned for Documenta 14 in 2017, was shot over several months in the Cradle of Mankind in Gauteng, Los Angeles (the City of Angels) and Durban, on the Indian Ocean. The complexities of the post-colonial crises that span the globe are depicted in the diverse locations and by the strange crew of eccentric individuals.
We have the trailer for a soon-to-be-made or impossible-to-make porn movie with a historic narrative, with Cleopatra played by Rose’s long-time collaborator Chris Martin. This is followed by a music video, starring MEGLADONN, which throws together cosmic concepts and Afro-consciousness in a mixture of Coloured identities. Finally, Rose’s son and her mother star in a starkly lit tableau, almost medieval in composition, referring to Rose’s frequent use of characters in abstract relationships, but also symbolizing the clash of deadly seriousness with absurdist humor which provides a punch in Rose’s work. Rose herself plays the screaming, living form of the caryatids – the red columns – commissioned for the corresponding exhibition in Athens earlier that year.
The main narrative concerns Cleopatra, who is reincarnated as a Black South African drag queen. Cleopatra is trapped in a cage; she is wild and angry. The line ‘Cleopatra was a black bitch’ is a punchline by African American comedian Paul Mooney, from a famous sketch in which he deconstructed the ridiculous, appropriative habit in the West of portraying the Egyptian queen as a white woman.
This is a story which utilizes the current state of white supremacist conspiracy theories and Christian doomsday predictions: the age of Aquarius being the end of humankind or Armageddon, there are rumors of a messiah being born, and references to the Black Madonna who is related to the sign of Virgo. While the narrative concentrates on Queen Cleopatra being a Black African woman, this video also references Martin Bernal’s Black Athena, an alternative thesis on the origins of Classical civilization.