BARCELONA.- Born in New York in 1960, Coco Fusco has developed a multidisciplinary career that encompasses video art, performance, writing and education. With commitment and critical reflection, her work examines themes such as cultural identity, colonial power, the representation of the other and human rights, its harsh subject matter balanced with a poetic and evocative aesthetic. This characteristic equilibrium is represented in the exhibition that opened at MACBA on 22 May, entitled I Learned to Swim on Dry Land, the first sentence of the 1957 poetic micro-story Natación (Swimming) by the Cuban writer Virgilio Piñera.

The exhibition is curated by the museum’s director, Elvira Dyangani Ose, and is a project developed in collaboration with El Museo del Barrio, New York, and supported by the Ford Foundation.

The exhibition brings together approximately one hundred pieces in diverse media, grouped into five areas: Cuba as an Empty Square; The Agency of the Other; Power and Prison, Civil Disobedience and Direct Action; and Fusco Archive. The tour offers visitors the chance to immerse themselves in the thought of one of the leading figures of art theory and criticism since the late 1980s, at a time when it has acquired additional relevance given the current change of political paradigms.

The Word and Cuba as an Empty Square

The exhibition’s focal points are the word, the symbolic use of silence or its imposition, and the inversion of language and the historical and present-day confrontation between artistic expression and power. A critical place here is occupied by Cuban poetry and literature, present in the different exhibition areas. The lives and imaginaries of dissident creators who have endured or are enduring repression weave an audiovisual, performative and documentary journey through post-revolutionary Cuba.

The exhibition begins with an open space, the Plaza de la Revolución, a metaphor for the unfinished promise of revolutionary Cuba. Her projects observe the consequences of the economic embargo and revise the romantic visions of the Cuban revolution that persist in Europe and the United States three decades after the end of the Cold War. Fusco has been collaborating since the 1980s with Cuban artists, poets and filmmakers on the island and in the diaspora, focusing since the end of the Fidel Castro era in 2008 on conflicts that occur between artists and the state.

To Die Dreaming (2011) and The Empty Plaza (2012) foreground Havana’s Plaza de la Revolución in a meditation on public space, revolutionary promise and memory. In the wake of the 2011 Arab Spring protests, Fusco questions why this square remains empty: what is lost with the institutionalization of the revolution? Also exhibited are several videos about repressed poets – Heberto Padilla (La Confesión, 2015), María Elena Cruz Varela (The Message in a Bottle from María Elena, 2015) and Reinaldo Arenas (To Live in June with Your Tongue Hanging Out, 2018) – along with the project Confidencial: Autores Firmantes (Confidential: Signing Authors, 2015).

The Agency of the Other

During the years that Fusco and Guillermo Gómez-Peña realized their well-known performance The Couple in the Cage: Two Undiscovered Amerindians Visit the West (1992– 94), they encountered two responses to their personification of characters from the fictional island of Guatinau. While the mainstream public believed that the Guatinauans were actual natives, intellectuals and artists insisted on discussing the piece’s moral implications rather than the work itself. What was meant to be a satirical commentary on concepts such as exoticism and primitivism proved to be a revealing exercise about the role of cultural institutions and the exhibition event as a producer of the notion of otherness. Also exhibited is the installation Mexarcane International (1994–95), a collaboration with Guillermo Gómez-Peña on the persistence of colonial fantasies in contemporary consumer culture.

Fusco has collaborated with the artist and performer Nao Bustamante to create actions addressing imaginaries of identity and gender. Included in the exhibition are Stuff (1996– 99), a commentary on globalization, tourism and sexism, as well as Paquita y Chata (1996), a photographic version of the Mexican papier-mâché Lupita dolls that traditionally represented prostitutes.

Power and Prison

The Eternal Night (2023) is screened in a bespoke cinematic space. Based on the testimony of the poet Néstor Díaz de Villegas, imprisoned in Cuba in the 1970s, it recreates life in prison and the power of the imagination to transcend it. Also presented is Aponte’s Lost Podcast (2025), an installation produced for MACBA with the artist and activist Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara, who is currently serving a sentence in a prison in Guanajay. Fusco connects his banned drawings to the revolutionary drawings of José Antonio Aponte, an

Afro-Cuban activist who organised a slave rebellion in 1812. During the interrogation that preceded his execution, Aponte described the drawings that had been destroyed. ‘To create the Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara project,’ says Fusco, ‘I recorded Otero Alcántara’s descriptions of his drawings during a series of phone calls and sent those recordings to several of his artist friends.’ Fusco asked them to adopt materials used by Cuban prisoners such as pens and cigarette packets.

In Rights of Passage (1997), made for the Johannesburg Biennale, Fusco created a checkpoint to access the enclosure, thus reflecting on the racist and discriminatory conditions of institutional power during apartheid.

Civil Disobedience and Direct Action

The reenactment or reactivation of certain gestures and languages of power has been the subject of several of Fusco’s works where she declares the futility of artistic practices that claim to exist outside a framework of institutional representation. Fusco manifests the need for the creation of new institutions and infrastructures that offer the conditions of possibility for an art that is critical of the system, operating within and outside of it.

This area addresses the ambivalence of that ‘sanctuary’ of freedom that once described the United States. A police infrastructure that denies civil rights to people deprived of their liberty and a dehumanizing order of individuals or specific groups are the subjects of projects such as Bare Life Study #1 (2005), Operation Atropos (2006), A Room of One’s Own: Women and Power in the New America (2006–08), a/k/a Mrs. George Gilbert and Sightings (2004).

The same racial and class stereotypes are behind performances such as Eu Sou Um Consumidor (I Am a Consumer, 2014), developed in a shopping mall in Rio de Janeiro, and Your Eyes Will be an Empty Word (2021), part of the MACBA Collection, which takes us to the Hart Island (New York) cemetery for indigent and unidentified individuals and those who died of aids and Covid-19.

Fusco Archive

This documentation space archives Fusco’s practice, which combines artistic research; the study of film language; narratives derived from literature, poetry and theoretical analysis; political satire; criticism and social justice projects. Also featured are three newly created works made in collaboration with Loid Der – Environmental Activists Assassinated Worldwide (2023), Journalists Killed at Work Worldwide (2023–24) and Artists in Prison Worldwide (2024) – which memorialize the names of imprisoned artists and murdered journalists and environmental activists.