Few artists have examined the ethnographic gaze as carefully — or turned it as deftly again on itself — as Coco Fusco. Throughout her profession, she has inhabited a succession of roles — museum specimen, interrogator, colonial queen, subaltern laborer — to show the programs that produce them. Her works, whether or not filmed, staged, or photographed, return to that charged encounter in order that what started as performances about being checked out has developed into frameworks for wanting again: at surveillance, on the museum’s equipment of show, on the digicam’s complicity, on the viewer’s personal place inside it. Fusco’s first United States retrospective, Tomorrow I Will Change into an Island at El Museo del Barrio, traces this evolving choreography of notion.
The present is split into 4 loosely thematic sections titled “Migration,” “Cultural Encounter,” “Interrogation,” and “Poetry and Energy.” In “Els Segadors” (2023), a part of the primary part, a various grouping of Catalans recites the centuries-old anthem of independence — banned throughout Francisco Franco’s dictatorship within the mid-Twentieth century and later revived as an emblem of sovereignty — reflecting on what the music now means to them. Filmed in a single, frontal body and intercut with candid exchanges between Fusco and her individuals, the work lets the efficiency slowly fray: delight provides method to hesitation, patriotism to unease, till speak of belonging turns to acknowledgements of exclusion. Voices slip between Catalan and Spanish, coloration alternates with grayscale, and the anthem mutates by salsa, people, and rap. Every shift introduces a hybridity that unsettles a set sense of Catalan identification; every slippage loosens the seams of the nationalist script it supposedly restages.
“Els Segadors” unfolds from a script that steadily breaks open, a type that applies to a lot of her work, together with her images. Rounding out the identical gallery, for example, is a steady band of black and white portraits depicting immigrants, mates, and strangers alike, posed towards city and home backdrops. Taken over the previous 12 months — a interval shadowed by immigration raids — “Everybody Who Lives Right here Is a New Yorker” (2025) initially reads as a set of casual but intimate portraits. Solely after we cross the room to come across Augustus Frederick Sherman and Lewis Hine’s early-Twentieth-century images of immigrants, hung in a grid, does it turn out to be clear that Fusco has staged her sitters to reflect the archival compositions. The folks in “Venezuelan household in Queens” sit in a neat alignment echoing Sherman’s “English Household at Ellis Island” (undated), whereas the beaming topics in “Ecuadorian little one distributors” holding bouquets reanimate Hine’s “Baby Distributors, Bowery, 1910,” their smiles lending heat to an iconic picture as soon as used to spur laws round little one labor. Notably, although her images are express citations of immigrant portraiture, they place folks not by the circumstances of their arrival however within the explicit methods they belong to New York.
That studied high quality defines a lot of the retrospective. Fusco’s performances typically borrow from institutional procedures: She recreates army drills in “A Room of One’s Personal: Ladies and Energy within the New America” (2006–08) and enrolls in an immersive simulation and workshop on army interrogation in “Operation Atropos” (2006), dissecting the grammar of disciplinary programs. Her movies carry the identical investigative and elegiac impulse. Works equivalent to “La confesión” and “La Plaza vacía” (each 2012) contemplate Cuban nationwide reminiscence, splicing discovered footage, oral histories, historic paperwork, partial testimonies, and Fusco’s measured voice-over to hint the afterlives of the Cuban revolution. Watching the hours of accrued testimony and archival fragments seems like becoming a member of her within the act of sifting. She speaks with the cadence of a reporter — methodical, knowledgeable, sometimes weary. Her enhancing, nonetheless, reveals an equally robust pull towards metaphor: Lengthy takes of the abandoned Plaza de la Revolución watched over by the monumental metal portraits of Castro and Che Guevara alternate with archival footage of army spectacle, the vacant sq. and its flattened icons mirroring the hollowed-out beliefs of the revolution itself.
A part of the “Cultural Encounter” part is a room that revisits Fusco’s earliest and most overt acts of institutional critique. “Two Undiscovered Amerindians Go to The West” (1992–94), made with Guillermo Gómez-Peña, is represented by picture documentation and a reconstruction of the unique cage. It satirizes the enclosures as soon as used to show Indigenous peoples at world’s festivals and museums, a follow that continued effectively into the Twentieth century, as a timeline on the wall makes clear. The artists — wearing hand-sewn grass skirts, leather-based wristbands, and purple face paint or masks — pose as “undiscovered natives,” staging an ethnographic fantasy of “discovery” and show. The cage’s mixture of props — a Kahlúa Tiki decanter on a European-capitals tablecloth beside a Mickey Mouse rug and TV — collapses distinctions between “genuine” cultural emblem and mass-produced commodity. The impact underscores the manufactured nature of such “human zoo” shows as spectacles of staged authenticity — a dynamic that, Fusco and Gómez-Peña indicate, museums danger repeating after they package deal non-Western cultures for show.
On this new set up, the cage has been restaged with its door open in order that guests can step inside and watch a documentary on the unique efficiency enjoying on a small tv inside. The gesture shifts the work’s that means: Fairly than observing the ethnographic gaze from a distance, viewers are invited to expertise what it feels prefer to inhabit its body. Close by, a wall textual content quotes a music by Los Tigres del Norte: “Even when the cage is product of gold, it’s nonetheless a jail,” a line that echoes Fusco’s personal skepticism in regards to the artwork world’s liberal pieties. The cage, on this sense, stands for the construction of illustration itself — one that gives visibility whereas preserving established hierarchies.
Nonetheless, the query stays: What precisely can we count on from critique now? To see this piece right here in El Museo is to face a quiet symmetry between an artist who as soon as staged marginalization as spectacle and a museum born from the Puerto Rican neighborhood organizing towards such exclusion. Close by archival supplies from the 1997 work “La Chavela Realty Firm” appear to handle such frictions immediately. They present Fusco dressed as Queen Isabel la Católica, the Fifteenth-century monarch who financed Columbus’s voyage, providing parcels of the New World on the market at a greenback apiece. Among the many “consumers” is El Museo del Barrio’s former director, whose signed deed now hangs beside photographic documentation and a campy golden robe with ship-shaped headdress designed by artist Pepón Osorio. Printed over a map and written in irreverent Spanglish, the deed is each grandiose and absurd. Introduced right here, the joke turns into self-referential, a correspondence between artist and establishment. It leaves open a query of place — what sort of important distance remains to be potential from the within? Is sustaining proximity to establishments the one viable mode of holding energy accountable?
One of many concluding works, “Your Eyes Will Be an Empty Phrase” (2021), gives one thing like a solution. In it, Fusco rows round Hart Island — the most important mass grave in the US, the place previously enslaved and unhoused folks and victims of epidemics equivalent to COVID-19 and HIV/AIDS are buried — reciting a verse by Cuban poet Dulce María Loynaz about isolation and endurance. The digicam drifts steadily, oars slicing by deep blue water, whereas violins draw out mournful, long-held notes. The allegorical picture clarifies Fusco’s political stance in addition to circles again to the exhibition’s title. To “turn out to be an island” is to keep up autonomy inside programs that devour distinction, to remain aside with out retreating. Throughout three a long time, Fusco has traced what occurs when ideology isolates, when nations and people retreat behind bodily and political borders. But the exhibition means that to “turn out to be an island” can also be to say autonomy, to inhabit the buildings of energy with out surrendering to them.
Coco Fusco: Tomorrow, I Will Change into an Island continues at El Museo del Barrio (1230 fifth Avenue, East Harlem, New York) by January 11, 2026. The exhibition was curated by Susanna V. Temkin and Rodrigo Moura.
