Céleste RogosinClear Jail Minotaur

Clear Jail Minotaur is an interactive & performative installation that invites us to re-think the figure of the prisoner in the age of surveillance and the diktat of transparency.

The work is based on the figure of the Minotaur – an ambiguous character from Greek mythology – reinterpreted as a symbol of the stigmatized and marginalized body. Here, the work dialogues with the testimony of an African-American former prisoner, Willard Birts. Thus the installation braids and intertwines materials and discourses related to imprisonment, questionning the links between identity, technology and power.

The piece combines blown glass and woodcarving – ancestral craft techniques – with new technologies such as 3D modeling and tracking. The title Clear Jail Minotaur refers to “clear jail electronics”, electronic objects with transparent shells, the only ones authorized in American prisons. This aesthetic shift is echoed by the transparency of the glass mask, scanned and modeled from a Bidjago helmet in the AfricaMuseum collection of Tervuren, Belgium.

Through tracking, the sculpture placed under surveillance reveals the songs of prisoners when the viewer approaches it. Blending memory, mythology and contemporaneity, the installation evokes possible forms of resistance, both formal and musical.

The video Untitled was made with dancers Maëva Berthelot & Anthonin Monié (Opéra de Paris), wearing masks from the Clear Jail Minotaur installation in public spaces.
Filmed on mobile phones in the style of low-tech prison videos, the artist and the dancers work together to find ways of bearing the weight of transparency, a glass mask weighing over 12kg. The dancers oscillate between suffocation, imprisonment by the object and attempts to deploy another body, hybrid and animal. Like a struggle to preserve its cathartic and spiritual dimension.

• Production Le Fresnoy - studio national des arts contemporains
  
  
• Composition Wood, glass, electrical cables, clamps, electronic and IT equipment: arduino led system, surveillance camera, boneless screen, sound card, mac mini, speakers, etc
  
  
• Artistic support Laure Prouvost, made with the help of Icam – Lille, AfricaMuseum – Tervuren, Berengo Studio
  
  
• Sound composition Sylvain Couzinet-Jacques & the voice of Willard Birts
  
  
• Programmation Lukas Truniger
  
  
• Video Céleste Rogosin with the help of Sylvain SCJ
  
  
• Editing Céleste Rogosin