A highlight of my time in Barcelona was a visit to the Museum of Contemporary Art (Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona) and the exhibition of Coco Fusco, is a Cuban-American interdisciplinary artist, writer, and curator.
C. Fusco's work is largely rooted in her own heritage and contemplation of cultural exile as she explores gender, identity, race, and power.
The exhibition entitled 'I Learned to Swim on Dry Land’. This is the first sentence of the poetic microfiction “Swimming” (1957) by the Cuban writer Virgilio Piñera.
It bought together a number of pieces, with highlights:
A video piece from 2021, Your Eyes Will Be an Empty Word, recorded in the waters around Hart Island, home to the largest mass grave in the United States, where New York’s unclaimed victims of COVID-19 have been buried. Shots of the artist labouring in a rowboat along its shores are intercut with drone overviews of a really quite lovely place where rows of small stone markers perfunctorily memorialize innumerable lost lives. Beauty stands in for unconsummated mourning.
For more check out https://www.cocofusco.com/your-eyes-will-be-an-empty-word
Another video piece entitled ‘The Couple in the Cage: Two Undiscovered Amerindians Visit the West’ (1992–93), where Coco and Guillermo Gómez-Peña performed as the title suggests.
The video documents the travelling performance in which they exhibited themselves as caged Amerindians from an imaginary island. While the artists’ intent was to create a satirical commentary on the notion of discovery, they soon realized that many of their viewers believed the fiction, and thought the artists were real “savages”.
The record of their interactions with audiences in four countries dramatizes the dilemma of cross-cultural misunderstanding we continue to live with today. Their experiences are interwoven with archival footage of ethnographic displays from the past, giving an historical dimension to the artists’ social experiment. The Couple in the Cage is a powerful blend of comic fiction and poignant reflection on the morality of treating human beings as exotic curiosities. While the mainstream public believed that the Guatinauis were actual natives, intellectuals, artists and cultural workers insisted on discussing the piece’s moral implications rather than the work itself.
The video is available on https://vimeo.com/751193618
For more check out https://www.cocofusco.com/the-couple-in-the-cage
