Exhibition 'Coco Fusco. I Learned to Swim on Dry Land'

Under the title 'I Learned to Swim on Dry Land', the first line of the poetic micro-story 'Swimming' by Cuban writer Virgilio Piñera from 1957, an exhibition is articulated. Its central theme revolves around language, the symbolic use of silence, and the inversion of tongue and language in a historical confrontation between artistic expression and power. Critical here is the role of Cuban poetry and literature, highlighting the lives and imaginations of dissident creators like poets Piñera, Maria Elena Cruz Varela, Heberto Padilla, and Néstor Díaz de Villegas, as well as artists like Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara and musician Maykel Osorbo, who have suffered or are suffering repression from the regime. The exhibition weaves an audiovisual, performative, and documentary journey presenting post-revolutionary Cuba in a complex articulation of notions like revolution and homeland. Cuba is central to the project, as are the United States, its immigration policies, the rise of the right, and its insistence on a structural monoculture. A myriad of documentation, curatorial projects, ephemeral objects from performances, and research will be reflected, some captured in publications like 'English is Broken Here' (1995) and 'Dangerous Moves: Performance and Politics in Cuba' (2015), or in successful exhibitions like 'Only Skin Deep: Changing Visions of the American Self' (2001-2003). Coco Fusco recounts that during the two years she and Guillermo Gómez-Peña represented the performance 'The Couple in the Cage: Two Undiscovered Amerindians Visit the West', they encountered two specific responses to this embodiment of two fictitious natives from the island of Guatinau. On one hand, there was the majority audience who believed the Guatinauis were real, and on the other, the attitude of intellectuals, artists, and cultural agents who pushed to discuss the moral implications of the work rather than the work itself. What was intended as a satirical commentary on concepts like exoticism or primitivism became a revealing exercise on the role of cultural institutions and the condition of the spectator; the museum's capacity as a generator of the notion of otherness, whether through reenactments of infamous human zoos or the formulation of a canonized aesthetic that offered little margin to other artistic experiences already emerging in the then-called periphery of art. 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 while still viewing cultural difference with skepticism. These are some aspects that have articulated both Fusco's work and activism since the 1980s, demystifying the multiculturalism of the art institution and the systematic framework that defined it. Her trajectory spans performance and video art; pedagogy, criticism, and art theory, alongside an incessant questioning and investigation into the power systems that traverse both her artistic and curatorial practice from the beginning of her career.