The Other History of Intercultural Performance

This essay, which we are publishing translated into Catalan as part of the exhibition Coco Fusco. I Learned to Swim on Dry Land at the MACBA (22 May 2025 – 11 January 2026), is a landmark in Coco Fusco’s body of work, not just as a review of her performance with Guillermo Gómez Peña, Two Undiscovered Amerindians Visit…, but also for its comparative analysis of the traditional ethnographic practices of putting non-Western individuals on display and certain contemporary forms of encounter between Western audiences and racialised subjects. The text explores themes of identity, authenticity and representation within the context of recent intercultural exchanges. Fusco notes that interest in setting up intercultural encounters – along with the consequent production of the ‘exotic’ – is not unique to our time, but is reminiscent of the early days of the Americas and the supposed ‘discovery’ of the ‘New World’. Thus, the ‘other’ history of cultural performance that Fusco formulates in this article makes reference to relational modes believed to be a thing of the past, the echoes of which can still be felt in any exchange determined by power relations, in which some observe and others are consumed as an exotic spectacle.