Coco Fusco
y Guillermo Gómez-Peña
Dos amerindios no descubiertos
en Buenos Aires
1994

In 1992, artists Coco Fusco and Guillermo Gómez-Peña staged Dos amerindios no descubiertos en Occidente (Two Undiscovered Amerindians Visit the West). The performance’s explicit framework was cultural stereotypes. The authors’ aim was to jar the celebrations of the five hundredth anniversary of the “discovery” of America and to question the oversimplifications of the multicultural museological model championed in North America at the time. The performance consisted of the staged interactions of the Fusco–Gómez-Peña duo, dressed as Indians from a remote and immaculate island in the Gulf of Mexico. Enclosed in a golden cage, they had been torn away from the fictitious human group and culture to which they belonged for display at different institutions in the United States and Europe, the regions the piece visited. The presentation in Buenos Aires in August 1994 was the last stop on the performance’s tour and the only one in Latin America—in a manner of speaking, since the United States cannot be considered in isolation from Latin America: by the nineteen-nineties, major demographic changes had altered the United States’ foundational myth. I am speaking of new cultural variables due to a growing Spanish-speaking population and African-American community that, after Vietnam and the cultural wars, radically transformed contemporary culture and drove a hemisphere-wide civil rights agenda. Indeed, Coco Fusco asserted that the performance was conceived for a Caucasian audience used to “festishizing representations of Otherness.” [1]

Performers Fusco and Gómez-Peña made use of an unlikely but corrosive fable, a sort of flipside of the fables used in the primitivist textual production of the historical avant-gardes (figures like Tristan Tzara, Guillaume Apollinaire, Blaise Cendrars, and Fernand Léger). A satire produced in the dying days of what Eric Hobsbawm called the short century, Dos amerindios no descubiertos en Occidente followed the lost path of the human exhibitions that began to take place in royal courts, fairs, and museums after Christopher Columbus’s arrival in America, exhibitions that reached their height in the nineteenth century. Presented in an array of contexts, the performance also appealed to the persistence in the collective memory of a robust—indeed, indestructible—colonial imaginary grounded in the chronicles and fantastic cartographies of European travelers and illustrators who circulated in the Americas starting with Conquest. Though it was global in breadth from the fifteenth century onwards, that imaginary, with only a few exceptions, was never rigorous enough for science or historical debate. It was, rather, trapped in the terrain of fantasy and of ethnography at the service of an ideology of domination. Fusco pointed out that, regardless of location, that widespread representation had become reality for much of the public. Indeed, both she and her co-author were met by threats and sexual advances. [2]

The artists touched a nerve. They exposed the nightmares of reason held in nostalgia for a dominant culture when that culture occupies the place of another, supposedly weak culture without providing any possible equivalence or encounter with that Other culture—or, for that matter, the Other itself—that might poetically heighten the One’s imaginary. Before decolonial thought was formulated in the Caribbean, Victor Segalen, a French naval doctor in the East, doggedly explored the Other’s constituent aesthetic not as imperative of moral correction but as expansion of the world and heightened experience of the unknown. [3] Segalen’s Essay on Exoticism and his ethnographic novel Les Immémoriaux nourished Édouard Glissant’s Poetics of Relation, a text that, read today without revisionist spirit, re-signifies and explodes the dimensions of Pierre Menard as author the Quixote and of Jean Rhys as author of Jane Eyre. [4]

Dos amerindios no descubiertos en Occidente re-wrote a genealogy of the medium that Fusco called “intercultural performance,” a medium that, according to the specialists, began with the Dada Cabaret Voltaire. The crux of this piece was situating the history of performance in the wake of the colonial undertaking constructed in the bloody representation of otherness. Everywhere it was presented, the piece included a time line of cases of human representation as far back as 1493, when Columbus returned to the Spanish court with members of Arawak communities. Fusco and Gómez-Peña’s strategy was to cannibalize the European avant-garde with the language of its own suprareality without scorning mass culture, spurious ally of processes of hybridization in the peripheries, as Jesús Martín-Barbero and Néstor García Canclini so resoundingly showed.

Salvaging Fusco and Gómez-Peña’s “cage”—as it was known in the nineties—positions the past as a deferred present that today’s archive puts before us as so many unpaid debts. This performance that, according to witnesses, went by unnoticed and without much ado in Buenos Aires demonstrates multiple perspectives that update, cancel, or put off the validity of the colonial imaginary when crossed with identities both national and individual.

In the inevitably incomplete genealogy of Latin American action art, some works have left lasting impressions by perforating normativities with their critical operations. One of the most celebrated, Dos amerindios no descubiertos en Occidente [Two Undiscovered Amerindians Visit the West] by Cuban-North American artist Coco Fusco (New York, 1960) and Mexican-Chicano artist Guillermo Gómez-Peña (Mexico City, 1955) was like none before it.

Action art (or performance) had struggled to gain recognition and visibility in art circuits. By the nineteen-nineties, however, it was blossoming. In 1992, in response to the events commemorating what was called, not without controversy, the five hundredth anniversary of the “discovery” of America, the Fusco–Gómez-Peña duo planned an unusual action: a three-dimensional body or “living diorama”[1] housed in a cage.  “Live specimens” (the artists) were enclosed along with an array of elements (chair, television set, portable computer, books, dumbbells, thread, voodoo dolls, food, and drink). Inside the cage, the artists interacted with one another and, through its bars, with the public. The operation was explicitly exoticizing, and hence lay bare the violence of interpretations of the “savage” bodies belonging to the “two undiscovered Amerindians” from the (fictitious) island of Guatinau origin (Guatinau being a possible “Spanglish” word for “what is now”).

The performance took place in the early nineties, specifically in 1992, just a few years after the signing of the Free Trade Agreement (1990) and a few years before the Zapatista Army of National Liberation was formed (1994)—two events that upset a number of reigning logics. In a turn perhaps jarring for performance insofar as conceived as unique, ephemeral, and unrepeatable act, Fusco and Gómez-Peña took their performance on tour to different venues and contexts. In a number of interviews, Fusco has described the short circuit in the reaction to this biting, critical action, a reaction that exposed the racism entrenched in both its viewers and the cultural agents at institutions—that despite their supposed concern with “multiculturalism.”

In the action, the artists made reference to a practice common in the modern world, namely the display of Indigenous peoples from various regions in zoos, museums, and “freak” shows. They underscored the ways the Other was written off during a period when postcolonial and cultural studies were proliferating, building a more and more critical and comprehensive perspective of both artistic production and its objects.

A work capable of breaking inertias to expose and formulate a problem is unquestionably an operation-agency that shakes up our artistic disciplines. Fusco and Gómez-Peña epitomized punk insofar as they bit into history and digested it critically. Let’s read the testimony of those who witnessed that work and hear their accounts of that now-distant action.

Coco Fusco is not only an interdisciplinary artist, but also an eminent performance theorist. She has studied the relationships between performance and politics, multiculturalism, and decoloniality. Books of her authorship include English Is Broken Here: Notes on Cultural Fusion in the Americas (1995), The Bodies that Were Not Ours and Other Writings (2001), A Field Guide for Female Interrogators (2008), and Dangerous Moves: Performance and Politics in Cuba (2015).

Her essay “The Other History of Intercultural Performance,” first published in The Drama Review in 1994, is now a fundamental text in the performance discipline. The essay makes frequent and explicit reference to Dos amerindios no descubiertos en Occidente [Two Undiscovered Amerindians Visit the West]. On the artists’ intentions in that work, she writes, “We worked within disciplines that blur distinctions between the art object and the body (performance), between fantasy and reality (live spectacle), and between history and dramatic reenactment (the diorama). The performance was interactive, focusing less on what we did than how people interacted with us and interpreted our actions […], We chose not to announce the event through prior publicity or any other means, when it was possible to exert such control; we intended to create a surprise or ‘uncanny’ encounter, one in which audiences had to undergo their own process of reflection as to what they were seeing, aided only by written information and parodically didactic zoo guards.”

Mexican artist and writer Pablo Helguera played the role of the "educator" when the performance was presented at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago in 1993. In this text, he recalls the instructions that Fusco and Gómez-Peña gave him, the general atmosphere at the performance, and the public’s range of reactions—silence, repudiation, anger. He believes that the work brought about "an exceptional moment of public reckoning with the racial, sexual, and cultural stereotypes" prevalent at the time.

From August 9 to 11, 1994, Coco Fusco and Guillermo Gómez-Peña presented the performance at Fundación Banco Patricios in Buenos Aires under the name Dos amerindios no descubiertos en Buenos Aires [Two Undiscovered Amerindians in Buenos Aires]. The foundation’s seat was a building on Callao Avenue in a busy section of the city. The cage was placed by the building’s large front window so that passersby could see it from the sidewalk. The audience, then, consisted not of specialists, but of unsuspecting pedestrians who did not know that Fusco and Gómez-Peña were engaged in a contemporary art action.

In 1992 and 1993, before coming to Buenos Aires, Coco Fusco and Guillermo Gómez-Peña took their performance to eight institutions in the United States, Europe, and Australia under the title Dos amerindios no descubiertos en Occidente [Two Undiscovered Amerindians Visit the West]. The first stop was the Plaza de Colón in Madrid, as part of the celebrations of the five hundredth anniversary of the “discovery” of America. It went on to other public spaces, museums of natural science, and art centers in different countries. The specific characteristics of each location informed the public reception of the work.

The performance in the Walker Art Center Sculpture Garden in Minneapolis on September 12, 1992 was part of an exhibition entitled Guillermo Gómez Peña and Coco Fusco: The Year of the White Bear. In the show, the artists brought together colonial, nineteenth-century, and contemporary art; the show had a soundtrack—a collage of poems and music in English, Spanish, and Indigenous languages. The exhibition-project included other performances, a radio program developed with local artists, public-television ads, activities with artists-in-residence at the Walker, and two multimedia installations. The first, The Tomb, was a projection in which a sculptural image of the corpse of a colonizer mutates to turn into the corpse of a native. The second, The Observatory, was an audiovisual collage of Indigenous, European, and North American images in the form of a Mayan astronomy observatory.

For centuries, inhabitants of distant regions were forcibly shipped for display as trophies in European royal courts. They were placed in cabinets of curiosities with collections of objects from around the world designed to show the power of nobles and the wealthy. Cases include members of the Tupi community taken by Hernán Cortés from the Americas to France, where they were presented to the king in 1550; a group of “savages” presented at the court of King William V of Bavaria in around 1580; and, in the seventeenth century, African natives forced by Frederick II, Landgrave of Hesse-Kassel to inhabit a village near Kassel so that their habits could be observed. In the late nineteenth century with the industrial revolution, displays of this sort were resuscitated as part of a new imperialist fervor. World fairs in large cities were a space to display the latest technological advances alongside the ethnographic “curiosities” of non-European peoples. In the United States, meanwhile, circuses, fairs, and carnivals furthered fascination with the “exotic.”

In “The Other History of Intercultural Performance,” Coco Fusco writes, “The original ethnographic exhibitions often presented people in a simulation of their ‘natural’ habitat, rendered either as an indoor diorama, or as an outdoor re-creation. Eyewitness accounts frequently note that the human beings on display were forced to dress in the European notion of their traditional ‘primitive’ garb, and to perform repetitive, seemingly ritual tasks. At times, nonwhites were displayed together with flora and fauna from their regions, and artifacts, which were often fakes.  […]  In the 19th and early 20th centuries, many of them were presented so as to confirm Social Darwinist ideas of the existence of a racial hierarchy.”

The images in this section were selected pursuant to Roberto Amigo’s suggestions. See his testimony in the Rumor section for an explanation of the context in which they were produced.

When, in 1884, Francisco “Perito” Moreno founded the Museo de la Plata, he had a personal collection of over one thousand human skulls, most of them of Native peoples from the Argentine provinces of Buenos Aires and Chubut. Much of that collection was exhibited at the museum in order to create an inventory of human diversity.

Perito Moreno studied Indians from an ethnographic perspective. For that reason, in 1886, he requested that the national government turn over to him Tehuelche Chiefs Foyel and Inakayal and their families, all of whom had been captured during the Desert Campaign that seized vast stretches of lands from Native peoples. The chiefs and their families held captive in the Tigre barracks would be transferred to the Museo de La Plata supposedly for the sake of scientific study.

Some of those individuals lived in the museum until the time of their death; they worked on building maintenance or engaged in their communities’ age-old weaving practices. The scientists treated them like objects of study, photographing them as part of their research on Native peoples. After death, their skeletons, brains, scalps, ears, and death masks were inventoried and put on display at the museum for a number of decades.

Since 2006, the Grupo Universitario de Investigación en Antropología Social (GUIAS, a social anthropology research collective) has identified their remains and returned them to their peoples. It organized a show entitled Prisioneros de la ciencia featuring the photographs taken by researchers from the Museo de La Plata of survivors of the late-nineteenth-century military expeditions. Exhibiting those photographs contributed to showing other ways that Native people’s rights were violated and to reconstructing their personal and collective histories.

We would like to thank GUIAS members: Marco Bufano Fernández, Fernando Miguel Pepe Tessaro, and Karina Oldani for their help with this project.