Fact Check: This video DOESN’T show French people urinating over African child 

A disturbing video of two men and a woman urinating on a naked person sitting on the ground with their legs folded and head bent down was widely shared on social media.

A netizen shared the clip on X, saying “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.” The archived version of this claim can be seen here.

India Today found that this video shows a staged act performed in Brazil’s São Paulo in January 2013.

Our Probe

A quick reverse search of the viral video keyframes led us to a longer version of the video which was posted on Vimeo (Trigger warning: Obscenity, nudity) on December 6, 2016. Here, this video was uploaded with the title, “Performance PIEDRA de REGINA JOS‰ GALINDO.”

Getting a clue from here, we looked further and found information about this video on the website of the Hemisphere Institute, an organisation in the New York University which connects artists, scholars and activists from across the Americas. Per the information given here, it showed a performance by an artist from Guatemala named Regina José Galindo.

This January 2013 performance was titled “Piedra '' which means stone in Spanish. The primary message of this performance was to highlight the apathy towards women's safety and how women have to endure violence. Galindo’s body was covered with black coal to symbolise the plight of the exploited female labourers and the effect of coal mining on the environment.

A still from the video in question can be seen on Galindo’s official website here.

To sum it up, a ten-year-old video of an artistic performance is being shared as people in France urinating on an African child.