the couple in the cage
In a series of 1992 performances called The Couple in the Cage: Two Undiscovered Amerindians Visit the West, Coco Fusco and performance co-creator Guillermo Gómez-Peña decked themselves out in primitive costumes and appeared before the public as “undiscovered AmerIndians” locked in a golden cage — an exercise in faux anthropology based on racist images of natives. Presented eight times in four different countries, these simple performances evoked various responses, the most startling being the huge numbers of people who didn’t find the idea of “natives” locked in a cage objectionable.
Perhaps their most potent performance was staged at Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History, a museum institution that has a legacy of displaying human subjects (such as for during the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition) and continues to present exhibits on non-Western cultures under the banner as of natural history. Many museumgoers who witnessed the performance believed Fusco and Gómez-Peña to be actual representatives from an undiscovered island, and though the Field Museum was not displaying them as human oddities, the colonial legacies and ongoing issues of exotification, racism, and power invoked by the performance were very real.
This provocative video, directed and produced by Coco Fusco and Paula Heredia, suggests that the “primitive” is nothing more than a construction of the West, and uses comic fiction to address historical truths and tragedies.
Perhaps their most potent performance was staged at Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History, a museum institution that has a legacy of displaying human subjects (such as for during the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition) and continues to present exhibits on non-Western cultures under the banner as of natural history. Many museumgoers who witnessed the performance believed Fusco and Gómez-Peña to be actual representatives from an undiscovered island, and though the Field Museum was not displaying them as human oddities, the colonial legacies and ongoing issues of exotification, racism, and power invoked by the performance were very real.
This provocative video, directed and produced by Coco Fusco and Paula Heredia, suggests that the “primitive” is nothing more than a construction of the West, and uses comic fiction to address historical truths and tragedies.