Coco Fusco, I Learned to Swim on Dry Land

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Image courtesy of MACBA.

Entitled, I Learned to Swim on Dry Land—the first sentence of the poetic microfiction “Swimming” (1957) by the Cuban writer Virgilio Piñera—the exhibition’s focal points are the word, the symbolic use of silence and the inversion of language with its historical and contemporary confrontation between artistic expression and figures of authority. A critical place here is occupied by Cuban poetry and literature.

The lives and imaginaries of dissident figures such as the poets Virgilio Piñera, María Elena Cruz Varela, Heberto Padilla and Néstor Díaz de Villegas, as well as artists like Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara and the musician Maykel Osorbo—all of whom endured the regime’s repression—interweave an audiovisual, performative and documentary journey that presents post-revolutionary Cuba to us within a complex formulation of ideas about revolution and homeland.

Cuba is central to the project, as is the United States and its immigration policies, the rise of the right wing and its insistence on a structural monoculture. Extensive documentation, curatorial projects, ephemera and objects from the artist’s performances bear witness to her artistic research, for example, the publications English is Broken Here (1995) and Dangerous Moves: Performance and Politics in Cuba (2015), and her celebrated exhibition Only Skin Deep: Changing Visions of the American Self (2003–04).  

According to the artist Coco Fusco, during the years she and Guillermo Gómez-Peña performed The Couple in the Cage: Two Undiscovered Amerindians Visit the West (1992–93), they encountered two very different responses to their personification of fictional characters from the island of Guatinau. While the mainstream public believed that the Guatianus were actual natives, intellectuals, artists and cultural workers insisted on discussing the piece’s moral implications rather than the work itself. What was meant to be a satirical commentary on concepts such as exoticism and primitivism proved to be a revealing exercise about the role of cultural institutions and the condition of the spectator, as well as the exhibition event or museum as a producer of otherness—either through the re-enactment of infamous human zoos or the formulation of a canonized aesthetic that offered little space at the time to artistic practices from the periphery.  

Reversing the framework of institutional representation, returning the gaze to the other, questioning colonial histories and the cultural and scientific processes that have constructed monolithic forms of identity and continue to observe cultural difference with some skepticism: these are concerns that, since the 1980s, have informed both Fusco’s work and her activism and institutional critique, demystifying the art institution’s multiculturalism and its frame of systematic meaning. Her artistic and curatorial trajectory encompasses performance, video art, pedagogy, criticism, art theory and research to interrogate systems of power.

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