Colored

VR

Colored is an immersive mixed-reality installation adapted from a biographical essay written by Tania de Montaigne. It’s the story of Claudette Colvin, a 15-year-old Black girl who, in Alabama in the 1950s, refused to give up her seat on a bus to a white woman. A Rosa Parks ante litteram whose revolutionary gesture did not receive the same public recognition as that of her elder a few months later, condemning her to oblivion.

At 83 years old, Claudette still lives in New York. Published sixty years after the fact, this biography, winner of the 2015 Simone Veil Prize, plunges us into a moment in American civil rights history that keeps resurfacing in our time. The feeling that to be Black is to be an inferior race, especially for a woman.