Wed 1/27 @ 6PM
Almost 30 years, performance artists Guillermo Gómez-Peña and Coco Fusco conceived of their project “The Couple in the Cage.” Tied in with the 500th anniversary of Columbus’s “discovery” of America, they toured North America and Europe in the guise of natives from a fake island called Guatinau that supposedly had lain undiscovered in the Gulf of Mexico for 500 years.
For two years they presented themselves to audiences as “primitives,” enacting behaviors typically assigned to non-Western people in a framework that mimicked the way such people had been exhibited in the past, complete with fake maps and authoritative-sounding wall cards, reflecting the clichéd assumptions Westerners had about distant cultures. It was described as “an ironic reenactment of the imperialist practice of displaying indigenous peoples in public venues such as taverns museums, world expos and freak shows.”
The events were filmed, directing much of the focus on the reactions of the observers and what they said about our assumptions about other cultures. That became made into the documentary film The Couple in the Cage: Guatinaui Odyssey by Fusco’s and Paula Heredia.
The half-hour video will have a one-night-only virtual screening by the Cleveland Museum of Art, with an introduction by curator Nadiah Rivera Fellah and followed by a live Q & A session. Go here to register.
screening-the-couple-in-the-cage-guatinaui-odyssey
Cleveland, OH 44106