Ongetitled, de Tracey Rose: la vigilancia colapsada

This article analyzes the video performance Ongetitled (Untitled)(1998), one of the most significant works from the early period of South African artist Tracey Rose. Developed in the privacy of a bathroom, under the gaze of a closed-circuit surveillance system, Rose shaves all the hair from her body in an attempt to minimize gender and racial markers that, even after the official end of apartheid, continued to regulate social relations in South Africa. The setting of this piece—a bathroom, a space of intimacy—allows for an examinationof the transition, in the global era, from the Foucauldian disciplinary model of “panopticism” to another “control model,” whose decentralized structure enables surveillance to extend across all domains of an individual’s private life. In Ongetitled, Tracey Rose enacts a dual “strategy of avoidance”—erasing both gender and racial markers—which ultimately destabilizes the classificatory logic of the contemporary surveillance system.