FONS ÀUDIO #63
Coco Fusco
Imatge: Coco Fusco, Your Eyes Will be an Empty Word (screenshot), 2021. MACBA Collection. MACBA Foundation. © Coco Fusco, VEGAP, Barcelona.
Coco Fusco (b. New York, 1960) is a Cuban-American artist and writer. Since the mid-1980s, her practice has revolved around performance, video art, photography, essay writing, research and teaching. Through these means, she explores issues such as cultural, racial, and gender identity; the construction of alterity; the colonial legacy; and the mechanisms of control, censorship and repression that systems of power impose on people’s bodies and lives.
In FONS ÀUDIO #63, Fusco discusses two of her works in the MACBA Collection. The first, Els segadors (2001), is a video she made during an artistic residence in Barcelona, in which she invited twenty-five people from different backgrounds to sing Els segadors (the Catalan national anthem)before a camera. Through their performances, the work becomes a device for reflection on Catalan identity at the turn of the 21st century, addressing issues such as language, race, social class, and family geographical origin.
The second work, Your Eyes Will Be an Empty Word (2021), was commissioned for the exhibition of Colombian artist María Teresa Hincapié held at MACBA in 2022. Coinciding with the COVID-19 crisis and in dialogue with the concept of ritual—which is central to Hincapié’s work—Fusco rowed a small boat around Hart Island, a in the Bronx, New York, which has been used as a cemetery for people who died in poverty or whose bodies were not claimed. The island was also used as a burial ground for numerous AIDS victims in the 1980s. More recently, many people who died from COVID-19 in 2020 and 2021 were also buried there.
Conversation: Loli Acebal, Javiera Cádiz and Anna Ramos. Script: Loli Acebal. Sound production: Anna Ramos and Albert Tarrats.
Imatge: Coco Fusco, Your Eyes Will be an Empty Word (screenshot), 2021. MACBA Collection. MACBA Foundation. © Coco Fusco, VEGAP, Barcelona.
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