My Barbarian’s video fuses elements from two texts which rarely meet: the "Universal Declaration of Human Rights" (1948), co-authored by Eleanor Roosevelt, and Melanie Klein’s 1929 psychoanalytic essay on how infantile anxieties surface in works of art and in the drive to create. The collective (Malik Gaines, Jade Gordon, and Alexandro Segade) pairs a charter of public, collective rights with a theory of the private, early-life origins of making. The result treats the mother as a foundational figure for both art and politics.

The video is organized as six short episodes in which the three members perform alongside their own mothers, as well as two artists they count as forebears, Eleanor Antin and Mary Kelly. The casting makes the work personal and genealogical: family relationships sit next to artistic lineage, and the piece traces what My Barbarian calls a modernist precedent “along a maternal line.” The scenarios are playful but carry real stakes. They show feminist, conceptual, and familial projects moving through generations, with both continuity and change visible. The artists appear as daughters, sons, students, teachers, and working mothers, so no single role holds still.

The final episode is the most striking. The three members take turns holding one another in a pose that recalls Michelangelo’s "Pietà". This quintessential image of maternal grief and care is redistributed among the group, so that each person becomes both the one who holds and the one who is held, and the collective itself stands in for the mother.

The "Universal Declaration of Infantile Anxiety Situations Reflected in the Creative Impulse" was presented in the 2014 edition of The Whitney Biennial (New York, US).