An old video showing three people-- two white men and one white woman urinating on another woman covered in coal is viral online with the false claim that it shows three French people urinating on an African child.
BOOM found that the claims are false; the video is old and shows 'Piedra', an art performance by Regina José Galindo and is not based on a real incident.
The two-minute long video shows the woman covered in coal crouched down on her knees and elbows while three people urinate on her in short intervals.
The video is being shared on X with the caption, "This is the filth of France, the ugliest scandal of the twenty-first century!!! The inhuman and shocking scene of two men and a woman urinating on an African child, in one of the French villages, and the child, completely stripped of clothes, lying face down on the ground..."
BOOM has refrained from including visuals from the post due to their graphic nature.
FACT-CHECK
BOOM found the video shows an art performance from 2013 by Regina José Galindo and is not based on true events.
A reverse image search of some key visuals from the video on Google led us to a GIF shared on the website makeagif.com. The GIF included a visual from the viral video and was titled 'performance PIEDRA de REGINA JOSÉ GALINDO.'
Taking a cue from this, we looked up 'Piedra' and 'Regina José Galindo' and found a blog by the Hemispheric Institute, a New York based organisation that acts as a network for artists, writers, and learners focussing on social justice.
According to the blog, 'Piedra', meaning 'stone' in Spanish, was performed on January 17, 2013 at the 8th Hemispheric Meeting of the Center for Art and Politics Studies, organised in São Paulo, Brazil.
The blog stated that the art performance was done by Regina José Galindo, a Gautemalan artist, and the description of the performance matched the visuals seen in the viral video.
The blog explains the message behind Galindo's performance and explains how both a stone and a woman are represented as objects of endurance. While a stone stays strong through all conditions, a woman too, endures the way a man defiles her (in this case, the act of urinating on her). According to the artist, a stone and a woman are disposable too. This refers to the women working in Brazil's ruthless coal-mining industry.
The blog further reads, "Piedra's simple yet poignant actions capture both a local and global crisis: the detrimental effects of coal mining on the environment, the predicament of exploited female laborers, and the pervasive structural violence against women that economic exploitation perpetuates."
The blog also mentions how Galindo then stood up and walked past the audience surrounding her, "onlookers remain still, staring at the urine left in her wake."
We then looked for Regina Galindo's website and found that it carried some photos from the show, along with her other work. The part about Piedra is described using a poem, and below it there is a description of the event: '8th Hemispheric Meeting of the Center for Art and Politics Studies. São Paulo, Brazil. 2013'
