The Aesthetics of the Oppressed is an experimental film installation that investigates the politics of identity, bodily transformation, and collective resilience. The work centers around the daily rituals of chest binding and physical compression—acts often performed in pursuit of gender affirmation, self-recognition, or societal legibility. These gestures, both intimate and violent, shape the body in ways that mirror the invisible architectures of systemic oppression. Inspired by Augusto Boal’s assertion that meaning lives in tone, silence, and movement as much as in words, the film transcends verbal narration. It communicates through somatic language: breath constricted, posture altered, limbs extended or recoiled. Vulnerability is rendered in sonic textures, visual abstraction, and the raw presence of movement. Each scene becomes a palimpsest of lived experience—a layering of pain, care, ritual, and refusal. Vertical video fragments fracture and reassemble the dancers’ bodies into still-moving specters, expanding and dissolving across the frame. These stretched, ghostlike forms become visual echoes of suppressed identities, ancestral memory, and evolving selves—illuminating what has long existed in the shadows. This installation asks: What does it mean to inhabit a body that must shift in order to survive? How do gestures of compression and containment also become acts of resistance, solidarity, and becoming? Ultimately, The Aesthetics of the Oppressed is not only a portrait of transformation, but a testament to the power of expressive form—when language fails, the body speaks. Duration: 00:11:00 (eleven minutes)

"If I do not understand the word, I understand the gesture; if not the gesture, the sound; if not the sound, the silence; if not the silence, the tone; if not the tone, the movement." - Augusto Boal

Exhibition Opening:
December 4th, 2023
Experimental Digital Arts at The Broad Art Center, Los Angeles, CA