Coco Fusco
Welcome to the universe of cultural misunderstanding. “It took Marco Polo nine
years to reach Cathay; and eight months for H.M. Stanley to get to the heart of
Congo.
Now, it only takes seconds for you to concoct the paradise of your own choice.
Bathe yourself in its warm rays without leaving the security of your home.
Enjoy the pleasure of escape without the pain of displacement.” With these
words Coco Fusco invites you to her Exotech Industries, “a universe beyond any
border you’ve ever known”.
This online virtual paradise is but one of the many
sites where you can encounter the New
York based interdisciplinary artist and writer Coco
Fusco. She is one of the most significant and influential performance and
video-artists (also an articulate and outspoken theoretician, as well as an
active curator) dealing with issues such as globalisation, and intercultural
theory and practice. Her work is an ongoing reflection on the conditions of
(women’s) bodies in globalising and technologically imbued environments.
City of Women has asked her to introduce some of
the different aspects of her
multifaceted cross-cultural work. She proposed to screen the video The Couple
in the Cage, to give a reading from her forthcoming book The Bodies That Were
Not Ours and Other Writings, and do a performance-reading of her latest play
The Incredible Disappearing Women.
The Couple in the Cage documents the
travelling performance of Guillermo Gómez-Peńa and Coco Fusco, in which the two
exhibited themselves as caged Undiscovered Amerindians from an imaginary
island. While the artists’ intent was to create a satirical comment on the
notion of discovery, they soon realised that many spectators believed the
fiction, and thought they were confronting real “savages”. The video-recording
of their interactions with audiences in four countries dramatises the dilemma
of the cross-cultural misunderstanding we continue to live in. Their
experiences are interwoven with ethnographic found footage, giving a 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.
In her forthcoming book, The Bodies That
Were Not Ours and other writings, Fusco explores issues such as sex tourism in Cuba as a
barometer of the island’s entry into the global economy, Frantz Fanon’s
theorisation of metropolitan blackness, and net.activist responses to the
effects of free trade on the Mexican populace. It also includes her critical
reflection on cyber-feminist theory and the role of maquiladora workers in the
global information network. Approaching the dynamics of cultural fusion from
many angles, Fusco’s satires, commentaries and sociological inquiries form a
sustained meditation on how the forces of globalisation affect the making of
art. Her own essays, interviews, performance scripts and photonovellas, which
will be published alongside critical essays by Jean Fisher and Caroline Vercoe
on Fusco’s theoretical and performance work -, take readers on a tour of the
current trans-cultural landscape.
The multimedia theatre work-in-progress,
The Incredible Disappearing Woman is about art, sex and death in the US-Mexico
border zone. It is the result of three years of research into the role of
subaltern women workers in the global economy and untold intercultural tales
from the history of American performance art. The piece is set in 1998 in a
museum diorama, just before the opening of a landmark retrospective exhibition.
The ‘live’ characters (one of them is played by Fusco) are three exiled Latin
American women who are members of the custodial staff of the museum. These
stage actors will interact with ‘virtual’ characters on video projections
(curators and scholars, visiting artists and museum guests).
The Incredible
Disappearing Woman is written by Coco Fusco. The video projections were
developed in co-operation with Isaac Julien and Peter Norman, and the play will
be directed by Robbie McCauley. It was commissioned by the Portland Institute
of Contemporary Art and will begin an international tour in 2002. At City of Women Fusco will
‘introduce’ this work-in-progress in the form of a performed-reading,
illustrated with video.
Program Coco
Fusco
Monday, 8. October at 23.00, Klub Gromka -
Metelkova Mesto
The Couple in the cage - a Guatinaui
Odyssey; Coco Fusco & Paula Heredia
1993, video, 30 min
Friday, 12. October at 17.00, Moderna
galerija, Info center, Tomšičeva 14, Ljubljana
The Bodies That Were Not Ours and other
writings / Reading
from her forthcoming book
Friday, 12. October at 22.00, Galerija
Kapelica, Kersnikova 4, Ljubljana
The Incredible disappearing women / Performance – reading of her latest play,
illustrated with video
organised by: Mesto žensk / City of Women
in co-operation with: Klub Gromka –
Metelkova Mesto, Moderna galerija, Galerija Kapelica
