Coco Fusco: "Seeing the rise of xenophobic attitudes in New York has shocked me greatly."

BarcelonaAfter being arrested several times on charges of desecrating patriotic symbols, Cuban artist Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara was imprisoned in 2021 in a high-security prison in Guanajay. He is one of the best-known dissidents of the Cuban regime: the magazine Time He considered him one of the 100 most influential people in the world that same year. Otero Alcántara can only make a couple of calls each week, and one of them is always to the Cuban-American artist Coco Fusco (New York, 1960), who records the drawing instructions Alcántara gives her and transmits them to other artists so they can execute them using the same means he has in prison: a bowl.

In this way, Fusco has managed to get his friend's art out of jail. Now some of these drawings can be seen in the major exhibition that MACBA is dedicating to Coco Fusco, the first major review of her career in the State and one of her most ambitious exhibitions. "Coco Fusco is a multifaceted artist, and her intellectual and aesthetic capacity leads me to consider her a public intellectual," says Elvira Dyangani Ose, director of MACBA and curator of the exhibition. "I've always thought she's an intellectual who has the capacity to work from an individual position, but also with a collective spirit in the transformation of our journeys through history," explains Dyangani. "Fusco combats hegemonic discourses, often imposed from the West, or she is also politically committed to civil rights, the rights of the mino."

Juliana Emilia Fusco Miyares, better known as Coco Fusco, is the daughter of an exile who had fled Cuba and had begun a career in medicine. She had her "strategically," says the artist herself, to obtain papers in the United States, and from then on, she acted as a "sponsor" so that her grandmother, uncles, and cousins could leave Cuba. "Since I was a child, I was the translator for adults and the English teacher for some of my cousins. I grew up in New York, but with Cuba's history constantly around me," explains Fusco, who first visited Cuba in 1985. It was then that she was able to meet her counterparts on the other side of the wall.

"For us, the Florida Straits are like the wall that divides two Cuban worlds," she says. On that trip, Fusco realized common interests with the intellectual artists living on the island and gained a more complex view of the situation. She was able to visit Cuba periodically until 2018, when a new wave of repression began. Since then, like other colleagues, she has been unable to return.

The weight of the word

The Macba exhibition is titled Coco Fusco. I've learned to swim on dry land., a reference to the ode to resilience in a micro-story by Cuban writer Virgilio Piñera (1912–1979). Many of the works in this exhibition have been seen at major art events, including the Venice Biennale, the Whitney Biennale in New York, the Sydney Biennale, and the Sharjah Biennale (United Arab Emirates). The common thread that Dyangani Ose presents is the importance of the word, its role in the public sphere, and the fact that it is sometimes silenced. The tour begins with a reflection on the exhaustion of the Cuban revolution, with a video showing the empty Plaza de la Revolución as the Arab Spring uprisings unfolded.

In the same Cuban context, there is the work Fusco did with the poet Heberto Padilla (1932-2000), which sparked a wave of solidarity among writers like Jean-Paul Sartre, Gabriel García Márquez, and Mario Vargas Llosa, and which the Cuban regime censored and maligned. "One finds neither reason nor logic in what the Cuban state says nor in what the US state says about Cuba, but it is in poetic language that one truly finds a purer, more sincere, more authentic expression, one that represents the hope and expectations of a people and also the vision of artists," says Fusco.

The exhibition includes one of the artist's most emblematic works, the critique of human zoos for which he caged himself with Guillermo Gómez-Peña, entitled The couple in the cageFusco recalls that they didn't expect the reactions they encountered and that they turned the situation around and turned the audience into their ethnographic subject. Later on, Pain from 10 to 10,the video with which he recreated the hours that the managers of a maquila In Tijuana, a worker was held inside a room for twelve hours to prevent her from forming a workers' union.

On another job, The feminine touch, Fusco brought to light how the torturers at Abu Ghraib prison were, at the same time, victimized because they had to use intimate facts like menstruation and body odor as weapons of torture; and later recalled that in 1970, when Angela Davis fled the United States, the police pursuing her arrested many women with Afro hairstyles, thinking she was her.

The exhibition ends with a series of works in which Fusco lists the journalists and environmental activists who were killed in 2023. Although she is not in the exhibition, she has already reacted to Donald Trump's return to power and his racist immigration policy. "The idea of seeing the growth of xenophobic attitudes in New York has shocked me greatly. I think the government is violating US laws and also norms that correspond to international laws on asylum and the treatment of refugees," she says.

Since 2019, Fusco has collaborated with a group that serves refugees and helps them with the asylum process. However, he hasn't lost hope. "Despite the cowardice of Congress," the artist concludes, "despite the policies of the Trump administration, there are judges who have risen up, there are people who are opposing them, there is a press that is revealing all the mistakes being made; in other words, good does emerge, obviously it does not represent power."