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 methods 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 trying 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 Turn 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 Power.” 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 a logo of sovereignty — reflecting on what the track now means to them. Filmed in a single, frontal body and intercut with candid exchanges between Fusco and her members, the work lets the efficiency slowly fray: satisfaction offers technique to hesitation, patriotism to unease, till discuss of belonging turns to acknowledgements of exclusion. Voices slip between Catalan and Spanish, coloration alternates with grayscale, and the anthem mutates by way of salsa, people, and rap. Every shift introduces a hybridity that unsettles a hard and fast sense of Catalan id; every slippage loosens the seams of the nationalist script it supposedly restages.
Set up view of Coco Fusco, “La Plaza Vacía (The Empty Plaza)” (2012), HD Video, 11:53 min
“Els Segadors” unfolds from a script that progressively breaks open, a kind 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, associates, and strangers alike, posed towards city and home backdrops. Taken over the previous 12 months — a interval shadowed by immigration raids — “Everyone Who Lives 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 develop into clear that Fusco has staged her sitters to reflect the archival compositions. The folks in “Venezuelan family in Queens” sit in a neat alignment echoing Sherman’s “English Family at Ellis Island” (undated), whereas the beaming topics in “Ecuadorian child vendors” holding bouquets reanimate Hine’s “Child Vendors, Bowery, 1910,” their smiles lending heat to an iconic picture as soon as used to spur laws round youngster labor. Notably, although her images are express citations of immigrant portraiture, they place folks not by the circumstances of their arrival however within the specific methods they belong to New York.
That studied high quality defines a lot of the retrospective. Fusco’s performances usually borrow from institutional procedures: She recreates navy drills in “A Room of One’s Own: Women and Power in the New America” (2006–08) and enrolls in an immersive simulation and workshop on navy interrogation in “Operation Atropos” (2006), dissecting the grammar of disciplinary methods. Her movies carry the identical investigative and elegiac impulse. Works similar 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 collected testimony and archival fragments appears 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, nevertheless, 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 navy spectacle, the vacant sq. and its flattened icons mirroring the hollowed-out beliefs of the revolution itself.
Element of Coco Fusco, “Everyone Who Lives Here is a New Yorker” (2025), 12 units of pigment prints
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 Visit The West” (1992–94), made with Guillermo Gómez-Peña, is represented by way of picture documentation and a reconstruction of the unique cage. It satirizes the enclosures as soon as used to show Indigenous peoples at world’s gala’s and museums, a apply that continued nicely into the Twentieth century, as a timeline on the wall makes clear. The artists — wearing hand-sewn grass skirts, leather-based wristbands, and pink 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 “authentic” 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 suggest, museums threat repeating once they bundle 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 taking part in on a small tv inside. The gesture shifts the work’s that means: Slightly than observing the ethnographic gaze from a distance, viewers are invited to expertise what it feels wish to inhabit its body. Close by, a wall textual content quotes a track by Los Tigres del Norte: “Even if the cage is made of gold, it is still a prison,” a line that echoes Fusco’s personal skepticism concerning the artwork world’s liberal pieties. The cage, on this sense, stands for the construction of illustration itself — one that provides visibility whereas preserving established hierarchies.
Set up view of Coco Fusco, “Two Undiscovered Amerindians Visit the West” (1992/2025), multimedia set up
Nonetheless, the query stays: What precisely will 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 Company” appear to deal with such frictions straight. 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 “buyers” 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. Offered 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 continues to be attainable 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 Word” (2021), gives one thing like a solution. In it, Fusco rows round Hart Island — the biggest mass grave in america, the place previously enslaved and unhoused folks and victims of epidemics similar 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 way of 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 “become an island” is to take care of autonomy inside methods that eat 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 “become an island” may additionally be to assert autonomy, to inhabit the buildings of energy with out surrendering to them.
Set up view of Coco Fusco, “La Chavela Realty Company” (1991) (left) and efficiency documentation of “La Chavela Realty Company” (1991) (proper)
Set up view of Coco Fusco, “Your Eyes Will Be an Empty Word” (2021)
Set up view of Coco Fusco, “Two Undiscovered Amerindians Visit the West” (1992/2025), multimedia set up
Set up view of Coco Fusco, “La confesión (The Confession)” (2015), HD Video, 33:06 minutes
Set up view of Coco Fusco, “La Chavela Realty Company” (1991)
Set up view of pictures by Augustus Frederick Sherman and Lewis Hine
Set up view of Coco Fusco: Tomorrow, I Will Turn into an Island
Set up view of Coco Fusco, “Els Segadors (The Reapers)” (2001), video, 22 min
Coco Fusco: Tomorrow, I Will Turn into an Island continues at El Museo del Barrio (1230 fifth Avenue, East Harlem, New York) by way of January 11, 2026. The exhibition was curated by Susanna V. Temkin and Rodrigo Moura.
