This article first appeared in the Berlin Art Week 2023 Special Issue of Monopol Magazine.
Sebastian Frenzel (SF): Coco Fusco, I would like to start our conversation by going back in time and delving into the moment you conceived your performances. When I go on your website, images of your previous performances pop up. One shows you and your collaborator Guillermo Gómez-Peña locked in a cage. You are both dressed as indigenous people, and a woman outside the cage is feeding you through the bars. What is going on here?
Coco Fusco (CF): The year 1992 marked the 500th anniversary of the so-called ›discovery‹ of America by Christopher Columbus. The US government created a special commission to commemorate this. Guillermo and I wanted to criticize the celebration as being politically and logically flawed. We critiqued the construction of an Other and the notion of discovery by presenting ourselves as fake indigenous people who could not speak any Western languages. Our docents explained our identity. While in the cage, I sewed voodoo dolls and served tea; Guillermo would pace around with a briefcase and pray to the television (our docents explained that a television set had washed up on our island’s shore). For a small fee, Guillermo would tell a story in his so-called ›native‹ language, which was pure nonsense, or I would do a very silly dance. For a bit more money, you could pose for a Polaroid with us. We performed in nine different cities around the world, in public spaces like Covent Garden in London or Columbus Plaza in Madrid, and in natural history museums
SF: How did audiences react?
CF: We did not try to be believable as “natives.” However, many people did take it seriously, so we decided to document the performance by making an ethnographic film. The performance allowed us to foreground the history of involuntary “performances” by indigenous peoples displayed in fairs, ethnographic displays, zoos, and aristocratic salons. We traced this history back to one of Columbus’s voyages in which he brought an indigenous person from the Americas to the Spanish court as a “trophy.” During the colonial expansion of European empires in the 19th century, this practice became more widespread. The explosion of popular entertainment for growing urban populations in Europe and America also created contexts for these ethnographic displays. In the field of performance studies, there was an important discussion about
intercultural performance that did not address this history in a systematic way before our project
SF: Another part of your exhibition at KW is your series of works about women’s involvement in military interrogations. What are these about?
CF: In 2004, pictures of abuses of prisoners at Abu Ghraib were published. The day they were issued, I participated in a conference with Angela Davis. I remember how
she compared those photographs o images of lynching of African Americans from the late 19th and early 20th centuries featuring white people gloating next to their Black victims. I was especially surprised to find women in the Abu Ghraib photos as perpetrators of violence. Then I learned about the high percentage of women involved in military policing. I managed to interview a couple of women who had been military interrogators, and then I also took a course led by former US military interrogators designed for people in the private sector who wanted to learn their techniques for extracting in
»In the US, we have an underclass of immigrants that basically allow Americans to enjoy a middle-class lifestyle, because they work for practically no pay. But where is the discussion of this injustice?«
SF: What did you learn about the use of female interrogators?
CF: Some of the most shocking stories about torture in military prisons had to do with the instrumentalization of female sexuality. Women would sexually harass Muslim
prisoners in order to break them. A female interrogator might sit in the lap of the prisoners. They would insult men by telling them that their penises were too small. In one
infamous incident, a women soldier pretended to be menstruating. She had theatrical blood in her pants that she put on her hand and smeared on the prisoner. People in the CIA believed that Muslims would be very sensitive to it, and top politicians of the time such as Condoleezza Rice and Donald Rumsfeld approved these strategies.
SF: Your new piece commissioned by KW is called ›Antigone is Not Available Right Now‹. Will we be transported back to Greek mythology?
CF: I often try to address issues of power and control that affect subaltern groups. My new piece is about the rise in popularity of authoritarian political tendencies in many parts of the so-called democratic world. Antigone has often been used to criticize tyranny. Versions of the play have addressed military dictatorships in Latin America, police brutality in the US, Communist regimes, and apartheid in South Africa. But it seems that nowadays, authoritarianism is making a comeback. In my performance, Antigone is fed up. She has been dragged out over and over again to defend democracy, only to find that nobody wants to follow the lead. She is taking a break in Hades and enjoying some quiet time
SF: Does this imply that your worldview is rather pessimistic? Or are things getting any better?
CF: I do not believe that there is a simple answer. We do not just go from bad to better. I think there are some situations in which there is progress and others that are more difficult and troubling. To give you an example: I have been visiting Germany since the 1980s, and I have witnessed a shift in attitude toward racism and cultural identity, especially among younger audiences. I remember the Oberhausen film festival in 1993, where I was one of the guest curators invited to present work from the African diaspora. The audiences at the time were adamant it was racist to talk about race; basically saying »we had a problem during the Holocaust, and we have overcome it and now we don’t talk about these things«. Then in 2016, KW invited me to create a performance and I chose to work on the German genocide of the Herero and Nama in Namibia. The discussions around that performance signaled a real change in perspective. We had marvelous conversations with the performers and the audience that were really thoughtful and deep. My experience with younger curators and arts writers in Germany has been very positive lately. And of course, Germany has become more and more a multicultural country.
On the other hand, we live in a time of extreme xenophobia in many other parts of the world. There are millions of people from the Global South who are uprooted due to political, economic, and environmental crises and they have nowhere to live. In the US, we have an underclass of immigrants that basically allows Americans to enjoy a middle-class lifestyle, because they work for practically no pay and do everything from building and cleaning homes, to harvesting, cooking, and delivering food, to taking care of children and the elderly. To me, that is just like the segregation that existed before the civil rights movement, but where is the discussion of this injustice? There has been a lot of celebratory talk in the art world after Black Lives Matter, and it is true there has been a lot of success in the art market for contemporary African-American artists. But it is also true that there is racial profiling in policing with deadly consequences, there are anti-immigrant policies, and there are more weapons in this country than human beings. So, am I optimistic or pessimistic? I guess I am both.
SF: So we keep going?
CF: We definitely keep going.
The exhibition opens as part of Berlin Art Week 2023 on 13 SEP at KW Institute for Contemporary Art and runs up to and including 7 JAN 2024.