Coco Fusco2003

Whether she is performing, creating video installations, writing for a wide variety of publications (from Art in America to The Nation,) or encouraging the exchange of ideas in face-to-face intercultural interaction or on the web, interdisciplinary artist Coco Fusco is attempting to disrupt the dominant discourse. Her current work focuses on the social impact of globalization and technology on subaltern peoples.* Playing with ethnographic documentary paradigms, soap operas, talk shows and variety show formats, surveillance cameras and closed circuit television, she examines how different cinematic and televisual genres shape perception. Embodied, engaged, and critical, her innovative practice assertively troubles the waters of contemporary culture.

"About five years ago, I recognized that I had completed a cycle as an artist and that I had to rethink my way of working and my focus if I was going to grow. The next two years were absolutely agonizing. I destroyed dozens of scripts and essays. I vowed not to work with any electronic equipment in order to define what my own physical and mental space was, and for one year only performed live with firelight. Near the end of that year, all the trouble I had had making creative decisions disappeared and new work emerged. The precipice turned out to be a grueling but needed step."