Coco Fusco’s “Tomorrow, I Will Become an Island”

Coco Fusco’s first survey exhibition in the United States opens with an image of public appearance and disappearance. Through a clear blue sky, a skywriter trails the words, “Only in darkness can you see the stars.” As the plane flies across the expanse, completing the aphorism famously attributed to Martin Luther King, Jr. in smoke, the beginning of the phrase billows into abstraction. Eventually, the entire text, which appeared as a legible whole for only a few seconds, fades into the atmosphere from which it emerged. 

The video, Only in Darkness (2025), made in conjunction with a series of commissioned public billboards and screens that debuted across Los Angeles this February as part of Frieze week, emits the glint of a collective hope not unlike Hannah Arendt’s conviction that “even in the darkest of times we have the right to expect some illumination.”1 Presented in the wake of the fires that ravaged the city and amidst the ICE deportation raids terrorizing its immigrant communities, the work also reminds the viewer of the danger of disappearance which ensues from public visibility under today’s conditions of authoritarian rule.

In the Cuban-American artist’s practice, representation—and the adjacent fields of perception, identity, and language—frequently adheres to power, but does not always obey it. Appearances, too, are contingent throughout the videos, photographs, installations, and performance documentation on view in “Tomorrow, I Will Become an Island” at El Museo del Barrio in New York.2

On a monitor opposite Only in Darkness, in the same gallery focused on “Immigration Narratives,” actors sing Catalunya’s national anthem, “Els Segadors,” against the white backdrop of a Barcelona film set. Made at the time of public debates around whether the song should be taught in regional schools, Els Segadors (The Reapers, 2001) addresses the xenophobic and racist fears occasionally veiled by calls for the anthem’s institutionalization. Between takes, the subjects, many of whom are the children of immigrants, discuss the rift between the pluralism of their own Catalan identity and the more conservative end of the debate vying to limit that identity to the veneers of bloodlines, phenotypes, and native language. A shirtless, mohawked Catalan raver sings one of the hymn’s more militant calls to “Take a good swipe with the sickle.” His presence suffuses the song with the aesthetic ironies imposed by the distance of history, laying bare the tension between the progressive idea of indigenous independence movements and the conservatism of those who, unlike the raver, appropriate revolutionary symbolisms merely for the purposes of their anti-immigration agenda.

Fusco routinely sees the same operations that she scrutinizes in systems at work in individual behavior. The exhibition’s second section, “Intercultural Misunderstandings,” foregrounds moments of interpersonal failure shaped by early colonial encounters. A recreation of the gold cage installation that housed Fusco and Guillermo Gómez-Peña throughout their traveling performance Two Undiscovered Amerindians Visit the West (1992–94) looms large in the gallery. Inside, a box television loops a film documenting their performance as “undiscovered” Indigenous persons from the mythical island of Guatinaui in the Gulf of Mexico. The cage literalizes the conditions of entrapment that have impinged upon particular bodies, identities, and modes of appearance marked as “Other” from the present all the way back to Columbus’s “discovery” of the Americas. Accordingly, passersby posed with the caged performers as if to inadvertently demonstrate that no progress has been made in the century since the routine exhibition of colonized Indigenous persons in museums, fairs, and zoos throughout Europe and the United States.

The different ways through which power is brought to bear begin to surface as the exhibition continues. In the “Interrogation Tactics” section, power is diffused by way of seduction. The digital noise of Operation Atropos (2006) and Bare Life Study #1 (2005) reveals the contradiction at the heart of this turn. Both shot with handheld digital camcorders, the videos signal the unilateral exchanges, sacrifices, and transgressions sometimes voluntarily undertaken by individuals in service of the imperial state.

In Operation Atropos, seven women, including Fusco, voluntarily perform as prisoners of war in a workshop led by US military investigators. They are screamed at, strip-searched, and repeatedly reminded that they are numbers rather than subjects. On the flanking gallery walls, women become the agents of those same interrogation practices. In Bare Life Study #1, Fusco plays the role of a theater director and prison guard. She demands fifty theater students dressed in orange jumpsuits to march single-file to beat of her “uno, dos” in front of the US consulate in São Paulo, then directs them to scrub the street with toothbrushes. As the students reboard the charter at the performance’s end, Fusco sheds her military persona and cheers on the students, sublimating the performative, scripted nature of the exercise in power.

Giorgio Agamben’s term “bare life”—life that has been stripped of all socio-political agency to the point that it is merely treated as a biological fact—comes to define not only the nature of the students’ performance but the artist’s, too. Compliance with her demands may resemble personal empowerment, but the axis of power nevertheless stills emerges from and returns to a force outside the video’s purview. Being a mouthpiece for Empire is not only positioned as ethically deplorable; it is also exposed as a losing game whose “victories” merely strengthen an exceptional power that can turn against even its most ardent performers.

Extreme consequences are kept at the fore of the exhibition’s final section, “Poetry and Power.” Four videos in the screening room center on the controlled dialectics of public speech and suppression, appearance and disappearance, and expression and censorship in post-revolutionary Cuba. The seventy-minute film La noche eterne (The Eternal Night, 2023) dramatizes the political imprisonment of Néstor Díaz de Villegas, an 18-year-old student who was sentenced to six years in prison in 1974 for a poem he wrote in response to Pinochet’s coup d’état. In two other videos, Fusco considers the legacy of the imprisonment of poets Heberto Padilla and Reinaldo Arenas and the “revolutionary system of collective surveillance” that dissident arrests depended on. Such ubiquitous, outsourced forms of control inevitably deterred individuals from entering public space altogether, as evidenced by the emptiness of Havana’s Plaza de la Revolución depicted in La plaza vacía (The Empty Plaza, 2012). However, in some contexts, including the one currently unfolding in the US, where the state can disappear its subjects as quickly and readily as it seduces them into compliance, encircling the peripheries can also seem like the only option for those most vulnerable to the center’s rule.

In Your Eyes Will be an Empty Word (2021), Fusco returns her polemics to American waters. A drone documents the artist as she paddles along the lush shore of Hart Island, where New York’s unclaimed Covid-19 victims are laid to rest. Reflecting on the fact that permissible death is merely the next logical step in a system centered around the biopolitical management of lives, Fusco, rather than succumbing to despondency or the seductive force of power, first takes a brief moment to learn the names of those she never knew.