Travel in the Box I

2007
video installation

The work is originally inspired by my accidental encounter with the children’s book “Henry’s Freedom Box” (by E. Levine, illustrated by K. Nelson) at a children’s book reading at a public Library in Louisiana, USA. The children’s story is about the figure of Henry Box Brown – an escaped slave and a figure in American history who shipped himself to freedom in a box from Virginia to Philadelphia in 1849. The box story corresponds to a headline in the newspaper from a few years back – of a young black man Charles McKinley who shipped himself home in a crate aboard a cargo jet.

OUT NOW | Issue 6 | May 08
Lala Rascic | Untitled. Travel in a Box

The motive of traveling in a box, as a stow away, disguised as cargo inspired me as it associated notions of both the fantasy of travel and escape – out of utter desperation – as in immigration, or escape from slavery, while both blend into one an utopian idea of arriving at a “better place”. This work was emerging just as stringent and expensive visa regulations for my native state, Bosnia and Herzegovina, were being imposed even by governments of states that belonged to the same country, Yugoslavia, until the 1990’s. This visa discrimination resulted in limited freedoms of movement and a population hoping to escape such a reality.
For the special environment of the Threshold Wave’s 22-screen display environment I use both text and visually suggestive imagery as a means of storytelling through two separate elements. The work is a video performance; the mutiple channels of video see me emulating the environment of a box, performing a monodrama from the position of a one that is in a box. The videos are rotated and re-positioned on the 22 screens.
The audio is the reading of the stories of Charles Mc Kinley and Henry “Box” Brown respectively. In later versions of the installation, this element is developed into another single channel of video, positioned to the side, where the text that is read (in english) scrolls on the screen translated to the local language.
Blackface is historically highly contested and with reference to the American minstrel show used this form to racially stereotype black characters all the while the black American was not just excluded from participating in this sort of entertainment but also enduring racism, segregation and discrimination. Blackface is synonymous with white suprematist demeaning and dehumanising world-views toward people of color. Here, I use blackface with utter caution and responsibility, in an attempt to establish a link between the modern day discrimination experienced by people of color and the global discriminatory policies imposed on the citizens of second and third world countries including my native Bosnia and Herzegovina. Consequently, I challenge the role stereotype by casting myself in two different roles, by making a dichotomy, black / white – fact / fiction as a means to develop the narrative.
This work is developed after my visit to the south of the US where racism was a glaring issue. I feel that it is not beside the point to mention that this year marks 200 years of the abolition of slavery. (L.R. 2007)