Agenda Barcelona

The title   I Learned to Swim on Dry Land, the first sentence in the poetic micro-story ‘Natació’ [Swimming] that the Cuban author Virgilio Piñera wrote in 1957, is the fulcrum of an exhibition, whose core is the word, the symbolic use of silence and the inversion of tongue and language in a historical —and present— confrontation between artistic expression and power. Cuban poetry and literature occupy a critical position here.

The lives and imaginaries of dissident creators like the poets Piñera, Maria Elena Cruz Varela, Heberto Padilla, Néstor Díaz de Villegas and others, as well as artists like Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara and the musician Maykel Osorbo, who suffered or still suffer from the regime’s repression, weave an audiovisual, performative and documentary survey in which post-revolutionary Cuba is presented in a complex articulation of notions like revolution and fatherland.

Cuba is the core of the project, as is the United States, its migratory policies, the rise of the right and its insistence on a structural monoculture. A myriad of documentation, curatorial projects, ephemeral projects and objects and their performances will be reflected in her inquiries, some of which are captured in publications like  English is Broken Here (1995) and  Dangerous Moves: Performance and Politics in Cuba (2015), and in successful exhibitions like  Only Skin Deep. Changing Visions of the American Self (2001–2003).  

The artist Coco Fusco explains that in the course of the two years during which she and Guillermo Gómez-Peña performed  The Couple in the Cage: Two Undiscovered Amerindians Visit the West \  they encountered two very specific responses to this embodiment of two local stories from the island of Guatinau. First, the majority of audiences believed that the Guatinauis were real, while the attitude of intellectuals and artistic and cultural stakeholders instead strove to debate the moral implications of the work instead of the work itself. What was assumed to be a satirical commentary on concepts like exoticism and primitivism over time became a revelatory exercise on the role of cultural institutions and the status of the spectator; on the capacity of the museum —or exhibitions— to create the notion of alterity, either through the re-enactment of infamous human zoos or the formulation of a canonised aesthetic that offered little room for other artistic experiences which were being generated in what was then called the periphery of art.  

They reversed the framework of institutional representation and returned the gaze back at the other, questioning colonial histories and the cultural and scientific processes stemming from them that have constructed monolithic forms of identity, which still view cultural difference with some scepticism. These are just some of the aspects that have been articulated through Fusco’s work, activism and institutional criticism since the 1980s, as back then she demythified the multiculturalism of the  art institution and the framework of systematic signification that defined it. Her career spans performance and video art; art pedagogy, criticism and theory; and incessant questioning and inquiry around the power systems that have permeated both her artistic and curatorial practices since the beginning of her career.