SOUTH SOUTH FILM
Coco Fusco and Joiri Minayi
29 April – 1 May 2022
Films will launch consecutively starting Friday 29 April at 8am GMT. All films will remain active until Monday 2 May 8am GMT.
“The absence of public in some plazas seemed just as resonant and provocative as its presence in others. Cuba’s Plaza of the Revolution is one such place—a stark, inhospitable arena where all the major political events of the past half-century have been marked by mass choreography, militarized displays and rhetorical flourish. I decided to create a piece about that legendary site—an empty stage filled with memories, through which every foreigner visitor passes, while nowadays many, if not most, Cubans flee.”
– Coco Fusco
“My work is a reassertion of Self, an exercise of unlearning, decolonizing and exorcizing imposed histories, cultures and ideas. It’s about reconciling the experience of having grown up in the Dominican Republic with living and navigating the U.S. / global North; using gaps, disconnections and misinterpretations as fertile ground for creativity. I’ve learned there is a Gaze thrust upon me which others me. I turn it upon itself, mainly by seeming to fulfill its expectations, but instead sabotaging them, thus regaining power and agency.”
– Joiri Minaya
Artists courtesy Alexander Gray Associates and Embajada
Coco Fusco
The Empty Plaza / La Plaza Vacía
2012
Single channel digital film
12 min
The Empty Plaza / La Plaza Vacia is inspired by the organized public protests in the Middle East beginning in 2011. Fusco took note of the communal spaces around the world being utilized and, in contrast, those left empty. The empty Plaza de la Revolución in Havana, Cuba becomes the protagonist in the artist’s meditation on public space, revolutionary promise, and memory. Intermittent close-range views bring the plaza’s architecture into focus and long shots documenting Fusco’s passage through the vacant square are punctuated by vintage archival footage depicting scenes from Post-Revolutionary Cuba. Throughout the video, a Spanish narration, written by Cuban journalist Yoani Sanchez, describes what appears—and does not appear—in view. “The absence of public in some plazas seemed just as resonant and provocative as its presence in others,” Fusco recalls. “Cuba’s Plaza of the Revolution is one such place—a stark, inhospitable arena where all the major political events of the past half-century have been marked by mass choreography, militarized displays and rhetorical flourish. I decided to create a piece about that legendary site—an empty stage filled with memories, through which every foreigner visitor passes, while nowadays many, if not most, Cubans flee.”
Joiri Minaya
Siboney
2014
Gouache mural (10 x 16.5 ft), two synchronized HD videos (shown here as single-channel video)
8 min 29 sec
I spend a month hand-painting the design from a found piece of fabric onto a museum wall. Once the mural is finished I pour water on myself and scrub my body against the wall while dancing to the beat of the song Siboney by Connie Francis, partially washing off the paint. This song was composed in 1929 by Ernesto Lecuona for piano, allegedly while homesick, away from Cuba. Later in the 50s, Connie Francis recorded the dramatic, drum-heavy, sensualized version used in the performance.
Joiri Minaya
Labadee
2017
HD video
7 min 10 sec
Labadee is a short video documenting parts of a Royal Caribbean cruise trip in Labadee, Haiti, and the dynamics that unfold in this privately-managed space (the space is fenced off and leased to Royal Caribbean until 2050). The subtitles in the video begin with text from the diary of Christopher Columbus when they first saw land, moving into a contemporary recount of the trip we’re seeing.
It meditates on the exploitation, self-exploitation, performance and access control created by the system of tourism in the Caribbean, and, in linking it to Columbus’ Invasion through the first sentences in the subtitles, it traces the lineage of these contemporary spaces to colonization.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Coco Fusco is an interdisciplinary artist and writer based in New York. She is a recipient of a 2021 American Academy of Arts and Letters Art Award, a 2021 Latinx Artist Fellowship, a 2021 Anonymous Was a Woman award, a 2018 Rabkin Prize for Art Criticism, a 2016 Greenfield Prize, a 2014 Cintas Fellowship, a 2013 Guggenheim Fellowship, a 2013 Absolut Art Writing Award, a 2013 Fulbright Fellowship, a 2012 US Artists Fellowship and a 2003 Herb Alpert Award in the Arts.
Fusco’s performances and videos have been presented in the 56th Venice Biennale, Frieze Special Projects, Basel Unlimited, three Whitney Biennials (2022, 2008 and 1993), and several other international exhibitions. Her works are in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, The Walker Art Center, the Centre Pompidou and the Museum of Contemporary Art of Barcelona. She is represented by Alexander Gray Associates in New York.
Fusco is the author of Dangerous Moves: Performance and Politics in Cuba (2015). She is also the author of English is Broken Here: Notes on Cultural Fusion in the Americas (1995) The Bodies that Were Not Ours and Other Writings (2001), and A Field Guide for Female Interrogators (2008). She is the editor of Corpus Delecti: Performance Art of the Americas (1999) and Only Skin Deep: Changing Visions of the American Self (2003). She contributes regularly to The New York Review of Books and numerous art publications.
Fusco received her B.A. in Semiotics from Brown University (1982), her M.A. in Modern Thought and Literature from Stanford University (1985) and her Ph.D. in Art and Visual Culture from Middlesex University (2007).
Fusco is a Professor at the Cooper Union School of Art.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Joiri Minaya (b. 1990) is a Dominican-United Statesian multi-disciplinary artist whose work explores the body within constructions of gender, identity, social space and landscape, complicating hierarchies through hybridity, challenging otherness and thinking through opacity. Born in New York, U.S, she grew up in the Dominican Republic. Minaya graduated from the Escuela Nacional de Artes Visuales in Santo Domingo in 2009, the Altos de Chavón School of Design in 2011 and Parsons the New School for Design in 2013. She has participated in residencies like Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Smack Mellon, Bronx ArtSpace, Red Bull House of Arts, Lower East Side Printshop, Art Omi, Vermont Studio Center, as well as programs like Bronx Museum’s AIM Program and NYFA Mentoring Program for Immigrant Artists. She has been awarded a Socrates Sculpture Park Emerging Artist Fellowship as well as grants by Artadia, the Joan Mitchell Foundation, the Rema Hort Mann Foundation and the Nancy Graves Foundation. Minaya has exhibited internationally, mostly across the Dominican Republic, the Caribbean and the U.S, and her work is in the collection of the Museo de Arte Moderno in Santo Domingo, the Centro León Jiménes in Santiago, Dominican Republic, and various private collections.
