excerpt from personal blog, Rogue Rave, JANUARY 2015

VICTORIA MODESTO, PROTOTYPE FOR THE FUTURE

The screen goes black. The music has stopped. A slow tapping sound like an ice pick on a window alternates with the sound of footsteps, as a white stage and the legs of a performer come into view. One leg is bare, a conventionally sexy woman’s leg ending in a towering heelless shoe. The other is less expected: rather than flesh and bone, there is a sleek black blade, a dark stalactite beginning at the knee and ending in a dangerous point. The spike taps and slices across the glassy surface of the floor producing the sound of a knife dragging across a plate. Scintillating, yet eerie. A dark and thrilling walking-dance has begun. Its dancer, Viktoria Modesta, punctuates the choreography with stabs at the icy floor, shattering the surface wherever the point of her spike prosthetic leg connects. It’s an appendage but also a weapon, and the result is fiercely beautiful.

Modesta’s music video, Prototype, features multiple vignettes that represent ideas of rebellion, difference, sex, and general bad-assery. A TV cartoon Modesta reminiscent of Betty Boop inspires a young girl to rip the leg off her doll and use the toy to repeatedly stab another doll, all to the horror of the girl’s mother. A boy carves “VM” into his desk, while, in another scene, Modesta enters the room with a prosthetic that flickers and buzzes to life like a fluorescent light surrounded with moths. A smug Modesta is detained by uniformed men resembling Nazis, who interrogate her for being a symbol of the people. They show her a photo of a man who has his leg cut off (possibly self-inflicted) making a peace sign.