Coco Fusco

The Couple in the Cage

Coco Fusco, Paula Heredia

Coco Fusco, Guillermo Gómez-Peña

A witty satire about cultural stereotyping. In a series of 1992 performances, Coco Fusco and performance co-creator Guillermo Gómez-Peña decked themselves out in primitive costumes and appeared before the public as "undiscovered AmerIndians" locked in a golden cage - an exercise in faux anthropology based on racist images of natives. Presented eight times in four different countries, these simple performances evoked various responses, the most startling being the huge numbers of people who didn't find the idea of "natives" locked in a cage objectionable. This provocative video, directed and produced by Coco Fusco and Paula Heredia, suggests that the "primitive" is nothing more than a construction of the West, and uses comic fiction to address historical truths and tragedies.

Seven Songs for Malcolm X

John Akomfrah

Darrick Harris, Danny Carter

The Black Audio Film Collective’s seventh film envisioned the death and life of the African American revolutionary as a seven part study in iconography as narrated by novelist Toni Cade Bambara and actor Giancarlo Espesito. The stylized tableaux vivants that memorialise Malcolm’s life referenced the early 20th century funeral photography of James Van der Zee’s The Harlem Book of the Dead and the elemental static cinematography of Sergei Paradjanov’s The Colour of Pomegranates.

Vivir en junio con la lengua afuera

Coco Fusco

Amaury Pacheco, Iris Ruiz

Though he first supported the Cuban revolution as a young man, Reinaldo Arenas spent much of his adult life on the island as a persona non grata because of his open homosexuality and politically dissident views.

The Woman by the Window

Coco Fusco

The Woman by the Window is a video essay about two Cuban writers who observe their world from their windows. One is the male protagonist of an award-winning film from the 1960s, the other is an award-winning female journalist in the present.

a/k/a Mrs. George Gilbert.

Coco Fusco

Multidisciplinary artist Coco Fusco chronicles public obsession with and depictions of Angela Davis. In 1970, after the state of California issued a warrant for Davis’s arrest and she was subsequently placed on the FBI’s most-wanted list, she went into hiding. In her public absence, her image was endlessly reproduced and disseminated as she was stalked by the State. Using archival imagery and fictionalized first-person accounts of the FBI agent who pursued her, Fusco’s formally inventive, sardonic, and fantastical short is a send-up of the surveillance state and weaponized imagery.