*DURATION HAS BEEN REDUCED FOR SHOWCASING PURPOSES

Alfredo Zapata’s Prelocutismo visually presents the artist carrying two marine tower speakers on a metal tube. The audio component features a vocal composition that serves as an anti thesis to the music and lyrics commonly played on the speakers by Puerto Rican boat owners. The speakers are symbols of the Puerto Rican boat owning subculture, mainly formed by middle aged cis-gender men. This hyper-masculine subculture sexualizes the female body and uses it for advertising. The sexual identity is often used to empower “el macho”, whom shows his monetary power through the boats and their accessories. One of these being the tower speakers that amplify music from genres like reggaeton and latin trap. Both genres are popular and widely accepted around the world, even though they promote sexual violence and machismo among hispanic cultures.

The title of the piece references the medical term prelingual deafness, which refers to deafness caused before birth or early in childhood before learning the language. The artist establishes it as a parallel situation with hispanic cultures being exposed to sexist music since their childhood. He analyzes the ways his country’s culture accepts and is heavily influenced by hyper masculinity and sexism, with generations of Puerto Ricans being raised in communities that do not know the language to fight these social problems.