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[MUSIC PLAYING] GEMMA RODRIGUES: Good evening, everyone. My name is Gemma Rodrigues, and I'm the Ames Director of Education and also the curator of the Global Arts of Africa at the Johnson Museum of Art here at Cornell University. But before proceeding any further, let us take a moment to acknowledge that the Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell is located on the traditional homelands of the Gayogohono, the Cayuga Nation.
The Gayogohono members of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, an alliance of six sovereign nations with an historic and contemporary presence on this land. The Confederacy precedes the establishment of Cornell University, New York State, and the United States of America. We all acknowledge the painful history of Gayogohono dispossession and honor the ongoing connection of Gayogohono people, past and present, to these lands and waters.
It's my great pleasure to welcome our esteemed guest speaker Coco Fusco to the Johnson Museum tonight as well as all of you in the audience whether you're with us in person or virtually. I'm also delighted to share that tonight's event is the result of a new partnership with Cornell's Public History Initiative to co-select and bring to campus one new visiting artist each year whose work explores themes of history, memory, or the archive.
Ensuring a rich and multifaceted visit for any visiting artist, however, truly takes a village, and I would like to convey my special thanks also to Paul Ramirez Jonas, chair of Cornell's art department, and to Molly Ryan, director of the Cornell cinema, whose generous contributions in kind and in funding will support studio visits with Fusco for Cornell's MFA students and bring Fusco's new film, The Eternal Night, La Noche Eterna, to Cornell cinema tomorrow evening so something to put on your calendars as well.
The decision to bring Coco Fusco to campus emerged from conversations between Stephen Vider, the founding director of Cornell's Public History Initiative-- currently on leave from Cornell's History Department-- and Associate Professor of History at the University of Connecticut; Andrea Inselman, the Johnson Museum's Ira Drucker curator of modern and contemporary art, and myself.
And this visit was first inspired by Stephen's moving encounter with Fusco's film Your Eyes Will Be an Empty Word at the Whitney Biennial in 2021. We're so grateful to you, Stephen, for your intellectual companionship, your vision, and your collegiality in getting this going, and we're just thrilled to welcome you back to Cornell this evening for tonight's event.
And it's my pleasure now to turn it over to you in order to introduce our esteemed guest Coco Fusco and also to just touch a little bit upon your thinking about the intersections between Fusco's practice and public history. Thank you, Steven.
[APPLAUSE]
STEPHEN VIDER: Thank you so much, Gemma. I really want to begin by thanking everyone at the Johnson Museum for all of their work to bring Coco Fusco here tonight and to bring Coco Fusco's video, Your Eyes Will Be An Empty Word to the Johnson this semester. And if you haven't had a chance to watch it yet, I really recommend. It's just kind of around the corner from here. It's such a moving piece to spend some time in.
I also want to thank my colleague and interim director of the Public History Initiative, Derek Chang, for all of his work to build and support the initiative and the Public History minor. I'm so deeply honored to introduce tonight's speaker. Coco Fusco is an interdisciplinary artist and writer whose work examines how imperialism, capitalism, and state power shape systems of knowledge and subjection. She may be best known for her path-breaking artistic, performance, and video work, including such pieces as The Couple in the Cage, created with Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Observations of Predation in Humans, a lecture by Dr. Zira, animal psychologist, and A Room of One's Own: Women and Power in the New America.
She is also the author of many works of art, performance, and cultural scholarship, including Dangerous Moves: Performance and Politics in Cuba, and English is Broken Here: Notes on Cultural Fusion in the Americas. She is the recipient of too many awards to list, including the American Academy of Arts and Letters Art Award, a 2021 Latinx Artist Fellowship, a 2021 Anonymous Was a Woman Award, and a 2013 Guggenheim and Fulbright Fellowships.
Her performances and videos have been presented at the Venice Biennale and three Whitney Biennials. And her works are in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Walker Art Center, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Whitney Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Art of Barcelona, among many other places. Since 2019, she has also been a Professor at the Cooper Union School of Art.
Tonight's talk will focus on Fusco's 2021 video work, Your Eyes Will Be An Empty Word. But before I turn it over, I wanted to share a little bit about why we wanted to invite Coco Fusco here and what I find so urgent and clarifying in her work. First, a little background.
The History Department launched the Cornell Public History Initiative in fall of 2019 with the hope of expanding discussions on campus about the many ways communities engage the past in our everyday lives and spaces, through monuments, museums, film, art, and historic preservation, among many other forms of memory and memorialization. What I see looking back now is how much COVID shaped the Public History Initiative trajectory and my own thinking.
It was only about six months before COVID shut down Cornell's campus, and Cornell's classes were still largely online for the following academic year. One of the first major projects of the Public History Initiative was a year-long oral history project where students recorded interviews with community members about their responses to COVID. And those interviews, I should add, are now archived at the History Center in downtown Ithaca.
Those oral histories were part of a larger movement across the country and the world to archive the experiences of COVID as it was happening and unfolding, what has sometimes been called rapid response archiving. That effort to archive the pandemic was, at the same time, tied to and, in some ways, I think, motivated by a question that I and many other historians had at the start of the pandemic-- why was it that most of us had been taught so little about, if at all, about the last global pandemic of this scale and speed, the influenza epidemic of 1918 nearly 100 years earlier?
From the vantage of April 2020, it seemed inconceivable to me and to many others that there were virtually no monuments in the United States to people who died in the 1918 flu. 675,000 people dead in the United States alone and no monuments to their name-- their names. That silenced begged a new question, one I have since posed and reposed to my public history students. Despite the efforts of historians and archivists, would we to ultimately forget COVID's immense and continuing toll?
German literary scholar Aleida Assmann writes, quote, "When thinking about memory, we must start with forgetting." And that, for me, is where I start, watching Coco Fusco's Their Eyes Will Be An Empty Word. The video follows Fusco in a small boat in the waters surrounding Hart Island, the small island, one-mile long in the waters just East of the Bronx, home to New York City's public cemetery. It was on Hart Island where the city buried people who died from COVID whose bodies went unclaimed.
I first saw Their Eyes Will Be An Empty Word at the 2022 Whitney Biennial. And it resonated deeply with me, in part, because of my own work on the history and memory of HIV/AIDS. I first learned about Hart Island from that research. Before Hart Island became a burial site for people lost to COVID, it was a burial site to people lost to HIV/AIDS.
In the 1980s and '90s, thousands of people who died from complications related to AIDS were buried on Hart Island, often because their families of origin were unwilling to claim them. Your Eyes Will Be An Empty Word make space to mourn those unclaimed, sometimes unnamed dead. But it also asks the viewer to reckon with our willingness to forget. It asks us to consider how and when a life becomes ungrievable and, in particular, how numbers and statistics overwhelm our capacity to recognize loss, even as it's unfolding.
How then can we counter this willingness to forget? How can we work against the unclaiming, the disavowal of lives and loss? I am so deeply grateful to have Coco Fusco with us here at Cornell tonight to give us space to open up these questions and more. Please join me in welcoming Coco Fusco.
[APPLAUSE]
COCO FUSCO: Thank you for the very generous introductions and for the invitation to be here today and for all of you coming out. I feel sorry for the people who are in the back. There are no more chairs? Or I don't know. If you want to sit on the floor, that's fine with me.
And thanks to the Johnson Museum and to everybody. I was corresponding with so many people. I'm like, God, you guys have so many people working on this. It's kind of overwhelming. But thank you all for all the efforts and for the really lovely presentation of the video.
I hope that people here have seen it, not because I'm-- want to be egotistical and insist that you see my work, but because I was told not to screen it as part of my presentation, assuming that you will-- would have already seen it. And I don't like to show fragments because it is a video essay. And I don't think that you can understand the piece unless you hear the whole thing.
I mean, it's only 12 minutes. I've made pieces that are a lot longer that people can't sit through. But 12 minutes is usually not too bad for museum viewers. So I apologize if you're here and you haven't seen it. But I think you'll still have an opportunity for a little while to see the piece.
So what I wanted to do today-- and I hope that that's OK. And we'll have time for questions. So if what I have to say doesn't answer what you came here wanting to know, you can ask me questions about other stuff. But it's basically how I got to this, why I made the piece, and what kind of research was involved, and what was the process, right?
So I just start by saying that, well, that sometimes, I've seen critics talk about the work as being about the forgotten victims of COVID-19 because I recorded around an above Hart Island, which is the largest mass grave in the United States. And it is, as Stephen was saying, where some of the victims of COVID were buried. Now, why they were not claimed is probably very different from the situation of people who died of AIDS.
I remember that time. And I lost family members and my closest friend, so it's a very painful period of time for me to recall. But I do remember the rejection, the kind of social outcast status of people with HIV in the early years of people becoming aware of this condition and its effects. And I don't think that that is the situation with the COVID victims. It's not like any-- that I have hard evidence. So I'm not speaking as an historian here. I'm speaking more as an artist and using conjecture and my imagination to figure it out.
But in New York, you have-- I think it's 72 hours to claim a body. And there are, as you have probably heard, because of the whole kind of hullabaloo around immigration and refugees arriving in New York, that there are thousands and thousands of people who are in the city who don't have papers. There were many, many before the last wave of arrivals living there, working there. Or they either don't have papers or they have false papers in order to work.
So there's no way to-- necessarily to identify them. Then there are many people who come from rural areas in Mexico and Central America. And their families may not have phones or may not have a way to be contacted quickly and certainly cannot get to the United States within 72 hours to claim a body. There are many people who don't have the money to pay for a burial and their families don't have the money to pay for transport.
I recently learned that the Mexican consulate in New York eventually arranged for the return of 8,000 victims of COVID, people they were able to identify as Mexican nationals. But I'm assuming that there are probably a lot of undocumented workers who were buried there, as well as people from Rikers Island and other prisons.
Because there was mass-- there were outbreaks in many prisons and also in senior citizen homes because of people being in proximity to each other and people who are incarcerated who may not have family that can afford a burial or may not have any family they're in contact with. So I had a sense of, who are the-- who's there is really a kind of really marginalized populations of the city.
But so there are people who are either deemed-- or unseen or deemed to be unseemly for one reason or another. But when I was thinking about the piece, yes, I went to Hart Island. Yes, I got a drone. But I wasn't so much thinking about, who are they? Because it's not possible to identify them. It's known that the Department of Corrections recordkeeping is really shoddy. So it's estimated that there are about a million people there. But they're not always-- it's not always clear who they are. And there are also body parts buried at Hart Island that police find and stillborn babies, some of whom are not named.
So there's multiple reasons why you can't really know who's there. But when I was thinking about it, I was thinking a lot about what it means to live with dead people all around you. Because it's something that Americans are not accustomed to, New Yorkers are not accustomed to. We have a public health system that's pretty good at erasing the presence of dead people. And that's not always the case in other parts of the world. And what I lived through in New York City, as did many people, was for several months, watching bodies literally pile up.
Because the gyms were closed and you couldn't really do very much. So for exercise, I would go ride my bike and ride past hospitals and see trucks outside and with the cadavers, in refrigerated trucks with cadavers, boxes of people outside crematoriums, boxes arriving at cemeteries. And the backlog was really shocking. And so that made me-- it sort of transported me to other places and other times in history when you literally were living among the dead. And what did that mean? And particularly in a society like ours where we're so secularized that we don't really have very many rituals around mourning and the dead and/or ways of responding. So that's a lot of what I was thinking about.
And as I began to think about it, in the first few months in New York, we didn't have masks. You know, nobody really knew where the disease was coming from or how it was communicated. So there was this generalized panic. And I stayed home with my son. I didn't have a fancy second home to run away to. So I just stayed at home. And I was working from home.
But, you know, it gave me a lot of time to work from home and to do my own research. And so I began to do research on the internet about the history of representations of epidemics. Because I was like, I don't really want to talk about-- I'm not-- I didn't think I was going to die. I knew I had health insurance and that I would get to a hospital and be treated if I did get sick. So I wasn't really worried about my own mortality.
And so I was more interested in, OK, how am I going to respond to what's going on around me as an artist? And I began to look at accounts and images of all kinds. And I would share with friends on social media. And then I started getting emails from and posts sent to me by art historians I didn't even know who were like, well, you have-- I heard you're thinking about this. You haven't seen this painting or that painting.
And this-- Daniel Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year, I read again after not having touched anything by him since college. And this really, this idea of the dreams, the interpretation of old women upon other people's dreams, and the things that happen to your mind when death is all around you, right? And this idea of being overwhelmed by visions, right? And I kept thinking about that and saying, OK, I want to make something like that about the kinds of things that come into your mind when death, when the literally the dead are all around you and where death is like staring you in the face, right?
And so I just wanted to show you a little bit of the kinds of artworks I was looking at and thinking about. And, you know, obviously, the response to plagues by a lot of painters was to paint dead bodies. So I just saw paintings and woodcuts and print work and all kinds of just like piles of dead bodies, like this one. And I kept comparing that to what I was seeing in the news and what I would see when I would ride around on my bicycle.
And thinking this is-- I was a child and a teenager during the Vietnam War. I remember like all the interventions in Central America in the '80s and the Persian Gulf War and the War in Iraq. So the idea of body bags coming home and all of that, I was familiar with that.
But after Vietnam, things got very controlled in terms of allowing the general public access to images of dead people returning, right? And especially in the Persian Gulf War, they just had a total blackout in the media on the arrival of body bags and coffins. I have a brother who was in the military who died in the '80s who was killed. And so I remember going to the airport with the soldiers and waiting at the airplane for his body to be lowered on this thing, right?
And, I mean, it is a kind of ritualistic thing. But what there was no public showing of this anymore. So to suddenly open the news and see representations of dead bodies all over the place was really surprising to me.
So the plague was probably the most consistent theme when-- or in terms of dealing with disease, but by the 19th century, as science got more sophisticated and also as imaging technologies for looking at microscopic bacteria that transmitted disease got more sophisticated, there were more and more artists who were looking just at disease without looking at the social impact of the disease, which I thought was really interesting.
And at the same time, as cities got more and more populated, more and more easily transmittable diseases infectious diseases started hitting-- cholera, typhoid, yellow fever, so on and so forth. And so I found all kinds of popular cultural depictions of those. One of the things that I picked up as I started looking at these images was not only how disease was represented, but how people responded.
And they responded exactly the same in the 17th century as we did. Parliament was postponed in London. Court cases were moved. Infected houses were locked down. Trade was stopped. And the borders were shut.
Well, what did we do? We shut down the courts. We shut down the government. There was discussions of marking people's houses where COVID was. Trade was stopped.
I mean, one of the reasons why it was easy for me to shoot at Hart Island was because there was no-- there were no there was no commercial boat activity around at that point in time. And, you know, Trump was shutting borders, right? So I was really stunned at how little things had changed in terms of what the state's reaction was, what people's responses were, and what artists were thinking about.
And then another thing that I noticed that frequently in the depictions of plague, that death would be personified with a skeletal figure or a ghostly figure, but some figure evoking something like a human being above, right? And so there'd be this triangular configuration where with masses of dead people on below at the bottom of the frame. And then at the top, there would be this kind of representation of death.
And I think that out of that, and Defoe's writing about the dreams and the imagination, I got this idea that I wanted-- if I was going to deal with representing death, that I wanted it to be something that was above, right, so hence the use of the drone.
The other thing I was looking at because it was incredibly amusing was just all the different kinds of masks that had been invented in the past, and then also remembering all the things that people used at the beginning of COVID before we got to the-- what is it-- KN95 masks, the incredible get-ups that people came up with, the medical personnel with garbage bags all draped all over them and all this sort of stuff. I mean, it was really kind of stunning and funny.
And then I was also looking at behaviors that thinking of the Decameron, which even the New York Times talked about the connection, that everybody with money was leaving New York City and going either to upstate, to rural areas to escape, to their second homes, or out to Suffolk County in Long Island, to the Hamptons where they had second homes. And a lot of people I knew did that. And it really pissed off the locals in those areas.
Because those people arriving from the city basically overburdened the health systems in those other areas. And I saw a lot of legislation was set up to control who could come in as a result of that. But I just thought the things, how we behave doesn't really change that much in response to this.
The other thing, the other similarity that was kind of taking me closer to what became my project was that I noticed that convicts were used in prior centuries to cart away the victims of the plague. Because the bodies were still infected after death. And so they picked people at the lowest rung of the social scale, right, to be the ones to remove and possibly get infected with the plague. And that then I started seeing news stories about prisoners in the United States also being the ones to bury the victims of COVID.
And so that's how I got to this story of the opening of the mass graves. And the people in white here are prisoners from Rikers Island, which as you may know, is the big jail in New York City. It's where you go before you're sentenced, right? But it's also, it's an incredibly violent place. There's several deaths a day. And they're often very violent stabbings and all sorts of horrific things happen there.
And there's also a lot of anti-prison, anti-incarceration activism around closing Rikers. Because usually people who are in Rikers they're there because they couldn't make bail, right? So there's a kind of economic factor of who ends up there. But it fascinated me that I didn't even know there was a mass grave. I'm a New Yorker born. And I lived there my entire life and I didn't even know that there was this mass grave at Hart Island. And so I got really curious about it. And I started looking for what I could find about it.
And then I learned that it was-- had had many purposes over the years. In the 19th century, it was during the Civil War, it was used to hold quote, unquote, "colored troops" from the Union Army. And then after the Civil War, it began to be used as a kind of dumping ground for undesirables of different kinds. So juvenile delinquents were there for at different times.
They had a prison that was active at different times. Spill over from Roosevelt Island because there are public hospitals on Roosevelt Island. So either people with-- that had to be quarantined with TB, typhoid, yellow fever were held at Hart Island.
And the last usage of that kind was for heroin addicts for rehab in the 1970s. And then after that, it's sort of-- its place as a holding cell for undesirable living people ends. And it just becomes used only as a mass grave. It had been a mass grave throughout all that time. But that mass grave plus prison, mass grave plus juvenile detention, et cetera.
So I'm looking at this and looking at this and figuring, this place is run-- was at the time run by the Department of Corrections. It's like, they're never going to let me go there during COVID. It's very difficult to get access. There are some activists in New York who have been pushing for access to the island for a long time. Because there are people who either know that they have relatives that were buried there or are trying to find out if they have relatives that are buried there.
And they succeeded after I shot the video in getting, I guess it's the government of the city of New York to order a transfer of control from the Department of Corrections to the Parks Department. So this period of Hart Island is now coming to an end. It is a very complicated process though because the island is not considered safe for people to just come and walk around. First of all, they're-- the buildings that are in the video are falling apart. So they're very hazardous. And so that's one thing.
Another thing is that it's not really sanitary. If you think about, it hadn't really hit me until I went to look at the place but it's only a mile long and it's really narrow. And supposedly a million people are buried there. And there is a very strong odor when you get close to the island. And I can only imagine that the island-- that basically that the Earth of that island is essentially human remains that have gone back to becoming dirt, right? Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.
And there are little tubes and things sticking up all over the island. I don't really know what the purpose of that is for. They're not grave markers. But if-- you can't really see it in this picture. But if you see the video or I can go back to the-- there's these boulders all around the edge of the island. Those were actually installed there after Hurricane Sandy. Because during Hurricane Sandy because of the erosion caused by the hurricane, some skeletal parts started floating in the water, and which was really kind of frightening. So there's a lot of people there. I'll just say that.
And another point I wanted to bring up in terms of what I saw in the history was the association of immigrants with disease, with infectious disease that could kill. And I found a lot of late 19th century and early 20th century depictions, mostly from magazines of different diseases as immigrants arriving on boats or flying in-- floating into the United States. And it kind of reminded me a little bit of this much more recent work by Rafael Esparza that's about fumigating and poisoning, essentially, Mexican immigrant workers in the 1960s.
So, anyway, that's where I was in terms of getting to Hart Island. And the other motivating factor was what I saw happening in the news and also what I saw happening in the behaviors of people around me. I live in Brooklyn. I live in Bedford-Stuyvesant, which for a long time was a Black neighborhood. And now it's gentrified and has become-- it's about to tip into becoming majority not Black anymore. And most of the people on my block now were working from home and homeschooling their kids and so on.
And they would sit on the stoops and have a glass of wine at 7:00 every night and applaud for the emergency medical workers and go out and socialize at a certain distance and wave to each other across. So I was watching this going on and then reading many newspapers every day and seeing that as the number of people mounted, number of people dead mounted, the more and more frantic attempts to kind of do a sort of psychological crisis management by heroizing the people who were trying to save people, and also by creating stories about individuals that had died that most of us didn't know.
So the idea was to kind of prolong-- you could keep your mind off of the presence of the dead by heroizing the living, and also by encouraging people to go out and clap and applaud, to find a way to celebrate something in the middle of this horrific accumulation of death.
And just, it struck me as a bit somewhat absurd, this whole kind of frantic journalistic effort. But I can understand the motivation was to control panic. As I did see other manifestations of panic, particularly in the early months of COVID. I don't know if this happened here because it's probably a lot more kind of calm, people behave more rationally. But in the city, because you're always afraid that there are so many people, there isn't enough of whatever. There aren't enough masks. There isn't enough food. There isn't enough water. And so you have to run.
And so I saw on my daily bike rides a lot of tussles between, basically, yuppies who were at home with nothing to do and shopping too much for whatever they could buy and workers who were being forced to work and were basically at the front lines fighting them off to keep them out of the stores, right? Because they would try to push their way in to empty the shelves of every grocery store of anything they could buy.
And the workers only wanted to have a certain number of people in at a time. And it got to the point where I would see like workers, mostly of color, locking the doors of supermarkets and making people stand outside and only taking them in one at a time to prevent the hysteria.
So I'm not the only artist that has done work about COVID. But I have noticed that what the tendency has been, has been, again, either the heroism-- like Shellyne Rodriguez's portraits of people who were going out to work and facing the possibility of getting infected during COVID. And then Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, who's a good friend, did this anti-monument that was about memorializing people's deceased loved ones, where you would give a photo of your relative that had passed away, with a dedication. And then a robotic arm-- he would feed the information into a computer. And a robotic arm would make a portrait of that person out of grains of sand, right?
And then so you could view this either online or in person at the Brooklyn Museum for a short period of time. And then it would disintegrate, the portrait would disintegrate as a kind of visualization of the disappearance of the person. But here, again, the emphasis is on a kind of personal individualized relationship to a loved one, as opposed to dealing with the phenomenon of being in the presence of death, right?
And I'm looking-- I was looking at these, just imagining what it's like to have to tend to this volume of dead bodies day after day after day. So here you have mass graves in Brazil, mass cremations in India, the overcrowded funeral homes in New York City. And I just kept thinking about all of this. So I had an invitation, standing invitation to do a piece for a museum in Barcelona, in MACBA, and a museum in Medellin in Colombia.
The curators in these two institutions were doing a retrospective of the work of Maria Teresa Hincapié. It's a Colombian artist who was a very dear friend of mine and a pioneering performance artist from Latin America. And we met at X Teresa in Mexico in the '90s here when she was doing this piece and I was teaching a workshop. And we ended up doing-- being in several events together, both in Colombia and Venezuela, then in London and here and there. So we became friends over the years.
She was very different in her work from me. She came from experimental theater, was very-- I tend to speak very fast and move very quickly. And she was really into sort of slow, working-- having a very different sense of temporality, slowing everything down to ritualize everyday life activity. And she also was very engaged with nature, particularly the nature in and around Bogota where she lived. But she died of cancer in 2008.
And a couple of years ago, these two museums wanted to do a retrospective of her work. And they asked Maria Jose Arjona, who's a Colombian performance artist who had been a student of hers, and me to create works. And they said, do something that is in some way speaks to the spirit of Maria Teresa's practice. So I had originally thought of trying to do some sort of pilgrimage. Because she had done many pilgrimages. Then COVID came and I couldn't move.
And then I thought, well, I could do some kind of ritualistic action dealing with Hart Island. So this is another piece of hers that she became very, very well known for called A Thing is a Thing, where she took all of the material possessions of one humble woman and created this structure with them and then organized and reorganized all of her belongings over and over again hour after hour after hour.
It was this amazing durational piece that won the top prize in the Colombian National Salón. And that was the first time in the history of the event that a performance artist had been recognized for anything. And this is a piece that I always show when I'm teaching performance to my students as an-- how much you can do with so little to speak about someone's existence.
So, anyway, it is a custom in Spain and in Latin America to memorialize the dead by throwing flowers in the sea. So I had this idea of doing that. And I knew that I couldn't set foot on the island. Because I had gone to location scout. And there were signs all over about not trespassing.
So I thought, OK, well, but I can get-- it's surrounded by water. I can get there in a boat, right? So then I was like, I can get there in a boat. I put flowers in the boat. And I'll go around the island. And that's what I'll do.
And then how to represent this, like I said, I had this idea of wanting to be, to see from above as if looking from the point of view of death looking down. So then I had to get a drone camera and somebody who would agree to fly it for me. Because it's not legal to fly drones in New York because of the planes.
So but so I called a friend. And I was like, do you know anybody? He goes, yeah, I have this friend who works for channel whatever TV. And he's got a drone. And if you pay him this much money, he'll do it. He doesn't care.
And then I had to get out there. So I needed a big boat to get to the island to lower me in the dinghy down. And so City Island is next to Hart Island. And City Island is part of the Bronx. And it's this little island where a lot of retired cops live.
And many of them have boats because it's by the water. And some of them charter. So I went to talk to a couple of guys. And they wanted to charge a lot of money. And then they were like, well, we'll go on this side, but we don't want to take you to the other side because it's ugly over there. And the thing is, the other side is what's in the video-- all the falling buildings and the sign of the prison, where you could see the graveyard.
And I was just like, oh, man, I'm not going to-- these guys are just being too controlling. And then they were kind of flipped out about the drone. And so thank God, you know, thank God for Cubans. So I was with, when I went to location scout, I brought a Cuban friend of mine who's a photographer with me. And he was like, screw those guys. I've got a Cuban friend in New Jersey who has a boat, you know?
And so, basically, we went to his friend who just has a boat for his leisure. And he makes a lot of money on real estate. And we said, we'll pay you just as much as we were going to pay to charter that. And he was like, sure.
So we got on the boat in the middle of the summer and rode out there with the dinghy, dragging the dinghy. And then they lowered me down. And my two friends had the drone camera, were controlling the drone camera. And then my other friend, who was the photographer, was trying to take stills.
But, really, because the dinghy goes like this and the other boat goes like this, you can't really use moving images from the boat. Or a still camera couldn't really control to focus well. So the photographer had to get into the dinghy with me to be able to photograph me. And then the drone camera could be stabilized. Because you can control it really well, how to move it, where to move it, and so on.
So that's how-- we shot in a very short period of time one afternoon. Because if you know anything about shooting, the light changes really fast. And then you have a lot of trouble with mixing images. So we had like two batteries. And I was like, OK, let's go, get that. And then I had to figure out how to classify the material, how to organize it.
And I knew I wanted music. And I went to a performance that Bill T. Jones had some of his dancers do at the Armory, while COVID was still on, where we had to sit like six feet apart from the next person, which was kind of weird. And there were these beautiful string music being played by all these different musicians. And one of them, I really liked the way that she played the cello. So I called her up afterwards and asked her to write some music for me. And she agreed to do so.
And then I asked Pamela Sneed, who's a friend and a wonderful poet who has a very melodious voice, to be my narrator. And that's basically how it all came together. I was sort of surprised that people were so taken with it. I was also surprised, when I got to the Whitney Biennial, to find that there wasn't more work about COVID, since we had all just been through it. But I do I think that-- I think we-- I think this society has a very, very hard time thinking about death.
We don't have the same kind of popular cultural depictions of death that I find in Mexico or in Peru. We don't have the same kind of religious fervor as I find in other countries. I've been to funerals in South America where you don't leave the funeral parlor. You sleep with the dead person, right? And you accompany them all the way to the cemetery. So I just think we're not so good at handling it here or thinking about it, conceiving, imagining, memorializing, and that that may explain why there was still a certain degree of tentativeness around the response.
Also, I think that maybe some people feel like the journalists did enough, you know? But there were many, many, many people in New York that died alone, many who died in basements. The areas of the city that were the hardest hit were poor areas with immigrant workers in Queens had the highest death rates. And many of them, many people just weren't even identified as having died of COVID. They're just found afterward.
So, anyway, I just-- but I was-- it was very present to me for a very long time. And I think that's probably why I got started on this. So that's it. And I'm happy to answer any questions you have.
[APPLAUSE]
SPEAKER 1: So I have a microphone, which I can bring over to anyone in the audience who has a question. Do you want to--
COCO FUSCO: I'm supposed to stay here, because otherwise I get-- I lose the mic, yeah.
SPEAKER 1: Yeah. Here you go.
SPEAKER 2: Hi, Coco. Thank you. Oh, my god, this reverberation. I was thinking about Pamela's voice and how when I first saw the video at the Whitney with Pamela, she was working on the Funeral Diva at that time. I mean, she, I think, published Funeral Diva, which is the book of poetry about the AIDS crisis.
And just I always thought about this lineage or linkage to the AIDS crisis and her work as like this Black lesbian poet and organizer during that. And I wonder if there is that connection as well when you thought or it was just the voice, that, I mean, her voice is so alluring?
COCO FUSCO: I mean, I've known Pamela, for more than 30 years. I remember her as a bartender at Bardot. I remember her as a spoken word poet in [INAUDIBLE] Poets' Cafe. You know, we've traveled together. We've been in many events together. But I really, I have to say, when I'm making choices as a director, many times they are formal.
And this was a formal choice, that I know her voice. And she has a beautiful melodious voice. And that she also has a certain gravitas in the way that she delivers. And that I knew that I would get that and that that's something that I really wanted.
SPEAKER 2: The text-- was it-- because you didn't talk. Was it something that-- because there's a lot of research that you showed us, but the process, was it a post performance? Was it in the midst?
COCO FUSCO: No, Yeah I went out-- the thing is, I had to make sure I had the material. There are different ways to do video essays. I've done a few, right? There's one way is you could do it like a writer and write first and then try to find an illustration for everything. But when you do that, you end up, could end up being really sort of stupidly illustrative of the words. And I think it's-- I shot first because I needed to see what I had, right?
And, of course, I needed to make sure I could do it, that it came out OK, that I had the material. Then I need to look at it. And then I need to think about how to organize material that isn't a narrative, right? So what categories do I make?
I was like, well, I have some shots of me, some overhead shots and some shots on the island, some of this. So I could do it by content. I could do it by style, right? Like moving shots, still shots. I could do it by just the water. There's all kinds of ways to classify these things, the material I had.
And I did another piece like 10 years ago that was shot in the Florida Strait. But there, I wasn't above. I actually wanted to be on the surface of the water because I wanted to evoke the experience of being a rafter that so many people from Cuba and Haiti and that leave on these rafts and are literally floating on the sea. So but there I had water. And I had to figure out, OK, how do I organized this material?
So I shot it first. And then, I mean, I'd been thinking, right? I'd been looking at images every day. I've been writing about them every day. I'd been corresponding with people who know much more about the art history of representing disease and death than me. I've been doing that for months.
But then I had to think of a way to make a story brief. Because, I mean, I was like-- I didn't have hours and hours and hours at Hart Island. And also, there isn't that much more to shoot from using the perspective that I was using. So I had to figure out, how am I going to tell this story, right?
And so what was important was to begin with the fear of touching the dead was not only a childhood memory, but it seemed to me to kind of hone in on, that's it. Why don't we have a way to deal with this? Because we're afraid to come close to the dead, right?
A lot of funerals take place that you don't even see the dead person, right? Whereas Latin Catholics, they jump into the coffin with the dead person and are hugging the dead person and kissing the dead person. So I was like, the fear of coming that close and what we do, the sort of neurotic psychic formations that are created in order to avoid coming into proximity with the dead, that's what I wanted to do.
And then so there's a certain level. It's like the physical fear, right, and psychological fear of touching the dead. And then there's the city managing the dead. And then there's the way in which the abstraction from the physical experience of contact with the dead becomes all about numbers, right?
And then there's a whole section of the narration that is about that process of abstraction, of getting away from individual deaths, mass deaths, management, right? And then management is about math, right, is about, OK, we put-- how many go here? And how many go here? And how many go here? And then also about managing fear, it's like, well, don't be afraid of 100,000 people dead. Because there were 500,000 here and a million here, right?
And then you start playing games with your mind, right, which I think was being done-- that we were doing it individually, but that also was being done to us as this was happening, right? So that was kind of the thinking and the way that the text developed. And I knew from the very beginning that I was going to use that Cesare Pavese poem.
Because the idea of death looking at you, right, that when death comes, it will have your eyes. So that it is death looking at us, right? And that's the thing, that you could talk about death. But when it looks at you-- when you think you're going to die-- right? Or when you're in [INAUDIBLE] and you come close to someone who is dying or dead, it's a very different experience.
I mean, I did-- you know, I've been mugged by people who were armed. And I saw my life before me, right? And it is a-- it's a very different feeling than the abstraction of death, right? So that's kind of what I was trying to get at in the writing.
SPEAKER 1: Coco, we have another question.
COCO FUSCO: Yeah, OK.
SPEAKER 3: Thank you. This is an excellent presentation. I wasn't familiar with your work before, but I'm certainly going to look it up now. And I really appreciate the talk. Also, I wanted to make the comment and then have a question. Wonderful courageous valiant efforts on your part to get access to the island. Thank you for explaining all of that. It sounds like you're a journalist at heart. So I appreciate that.
I do have a question. And forgive me if it's not appropriate. I realize you're not a lawyer. And it's not a religious or moral question. But my understanding was in New York State, if you are untethered or unnamed, that the state, at least, would cremate those bodies versus there being a grave with a body. What is your research led to that? And, again, I realize you're not a lawyer or no estate planner.
COCO FUSCO: Well, Hart Island is the proof that that's not the case.
SPEAKER 3: Thank you.
COCO FUSCO: The thing is, I can't tell you that every single dead person unclaimed is there. It is there though. And as was mentioned at the beginning, during the AIDS crisis, the graves, the mass grave was opened. And many people were buried there during the AIDS crisis and now more recently during COVID.
I mean, the other thing is that there's this whole thing of the NYPD finding body parts, right? And then those are buried there. And stillborn babies are sometimes buried there. I think that the practice is not as routine now as it may have once been, right? But I mean, the fact that the place is still active as a mass grave indicates that not everybody is cremated.
I mean, I don't really have the legalities of it. I don't know what's going to happen now because it's been taken over by the Parks Department. I know that the plan is to tear down all the buildings. Because they've been deemed unsafe. So whatever's depicted in the video that I made is not going to be there for much longer. And then they're probably going to have to do a lot more to make it a place that can be visited by people who are not from Rikers Island. Because I
Know that the Department of Corrections doesn't want people who are not prisoners to be on the island with people who are prisoners, right? So they'll either end the use of prisoners on the island or they will have hours of the day when the public can be there. And I don't know what they're going to do. But they're going to have to figure that one out.
SPEAKER 4: Hello.
COCO FUSCO: Hi.
SPEAKER 4: Thank you so much for coming. I'm coming from a Caribbean Catholic family. And it kind of goes without saying that death was talked about all the time and in a very different way than a lot of my peers here. So you mentioned quarantining with your son. And I'm wondering what you think about or sort of employed when talking about death with him and to whatever comfort level.
COCO FUSCO: Oh, man, I don't-- I think we probably joked a lot during-- because we were stuck at home. And he was like 16. The last thing he wants is to be with mom all the time, right? And it was very depressing, I have to say. He was definitely, like as many, many adolescents, a casualty of the COVID pandemic. He got very, very depressed because of the isolation and not being able to go out, having no social activities, no sports. So it was just really devastating. So I didn't really want to add to that by fixating on death in my conversations with him.
That said, he knows that my father died when I was a child, that I lost my brother when I was in my 20s, and was in the military, that my cousin died of HIV, that my closest friend in college also died of AIDS, that I-- you know, that I've been-- that I have experiences of dealing with losing people very close to me very early in my life that made me somewhat different from a lot of the peers that I was dealing with when I was in school. Because we had associated death with something that happened to very old people.
But when I was in my 20s and 30s during the AIDS crisis. And there were peers of mine were just dropping all over the place. And we were not prepared to contend with that among ourselves, right, among our own generation. And I think that it made many of us, very, very aware of the fragility of life and of the injustices being committed against people who were really ill.
I mean, I had-- my friend was my close friend who passed away at 31, he had to hide that he was sick for a long time. He couldn't get health insurance. My mother was a physician. I begged my mother to lie and get to help, get him some health insurance so that he could get some treatment. It was like many, many of us were pretending to be other people and to give blood so that we could get our friends who were already sick health insurance.
And then the health insurance companies figured out that people were doing this. And so they started, like, you had to-- they have to come to your house to do the blood tests. And you have to show them all these IDs. We would just shuffle everything around at the time trying to help people, right? So, you know, that's not something that you would expect to have to go through early in life. But I did. So my son knows that. It's not like I spend all the time-- all my time talking about it, but he knows it.
SPEAKER 4: Thank you.
SPEAKER 5: Hello, and thank you for coming. I have a question about your show in Chicago at the Field Museum. I think it was 1993.
COCO FUSCO: Oh yeah, when I was in a cage, uh-huh.
SPEAKER 5: I went up there. And I went up to this cage and saw you in the cage. And I remember standing around listening to people watching and saying things like, how can they do this to people? How can they do to these people? And I was reflecting on how people were able to-- how they were believing that it was for real. The museum staff were overwhelmed with people complaining that they were doing this to the--
COCO FUSCO: To the poor Indigenous people from [INAUDIBLE], yeah.
SPEAKER 5: Right, yes. That stuck with me for a long time. Recently, I told this story to some students here at Cornell. And they-- the only thing they were interested in was whether you were an American Indian.
COCO FUSCO: Right.
SPEAKER 5: They felt otherwise, you shouldn't have done that whole show. And I remember feeling so disappointed.
COCO FUSCO: Well, it's very interesting--
SPEAKER 5: I thought I would ask you.
COCO FUSCO: I mean, that's where the debate is these days. It's very much we're sort of return to a sort of '70s style cultural nationalism. At the time that Guillermo and I were developing that piece, we very specifically decided not to represent any existent Indigenous group. Because we did not want to appropriate somebody's identity. And what the whole point of the piece was to show that the construct of the primitive was invented by Europeans and existed in the minds of Europeans only, that there was no reality, that we were a simulation of their fantasy of the other. And that's all it was.
And in the process of doing that piece. We also had to negotiate with many representatives of Indigenous groups in the US and in Australia and then later on in South America. And when we would go to places where-- in Australia, there was an Aboriginal advisory committee at the museum where we were presenting ourselves that had to approve any work that had to do with indigeneity. And we explained everything. We sat down. They were like, we're totally into what you're doing. We want you can include this information in your chronology. But we don't want you to do this. And we were totally cool. It was agreed.
Same in Minneapolis, which has the largest Indigenous urban population in the United States. I sat with the person who was in charge of the Lakota there at the time, explained what we wanted to do. And he was like, you don't want-- we don't want you to do this. You can do this.
And when we were in Washington, we worked with the curator who was-- it was [? Pima, ?] who's a very dear friend of mine, [INAUDIBLE], who was the person in charge of Native American everything for the Smithsonian Natural History Museum. She organized our presentation there.
So I kind of feel like the kids these days are like, they've got to calm down and really understand the politics of representation before jumping on everybody about authenticity. But I do believe in a-- that you can work in-- you can have dialogue with groups of people who are not like you and figure out ways to work together.
And I have been-- I'm very happy that years later, even though it's kind of tiresome for me. I always have to talk about the cage. It's been more than 30 years. I've done a lot of other work. But people are obsessed with the piece, whatever.
But I do get contacted by younger Indigenous artists in other parts of the world who feel really inspired by what Guillermo and I did and have asked me to write about the stuff that they do, have made videos where they talk about the influence of the piece. So, you know, I'm calm and happy.
Because the Indigenous people that I talk to, "the real ones" get it, right? And it's everybody else who's so freaked out about identity politics that they're so into punishing whoever they think is doing something wrong that they're actually not really talking to the people who have a stake in the story.
SPEAKER 5: I'm so glad to hear you talk about this. I thought it was a stunning, fascinating, fantastic show. And I completely agree. And why don't you write something about this, what's happened?
COCO FUSCO: I did. Oh my god.
SPEAKER 5: What's happened in the 30 years?
COCO FUSCO: I have been asked to write so many-- I mean, I wrote a very long essay about the performance in '94 that's been reprinted I don't know how many times. And 20 years later, I got asked to write it again. Now for the retrospective in Berlin, I had to write about it again.
And I'm kind of like-- at this point, I'm like, you know what? Let others do the writing. And especially I actually asked Samoan performance artist Yuki Kihara, who's a fa'afafine, like third sex person, who has done a lot of work about the ethnographic display of people from the South Pacific. She made a little video where she talked about the piece. And then Sebastian Calfuqueo, who's a Mapuche performance artist, also did a little video about, talking about the influence of the piece.
I'm like, I want others to talk about it now. I'm like, I'm done. I want to talk about the things that I'm working on now, right? And I want to focus on those, on the things that are important now. There's somebody in the back,
SPEAKER 5: It's still important.
COCO FUSCO: Yeah, but, I mean, I have-- I've been teaching for 30 years. I have a lot of students who flip out just like that. And I have-- I can spend-- I can do the work in the classroom much better than just another essay.
SPEAKER 6: Well, hi, thank you for coming. It's such a real treat to be able to connect the moving movie with the artist. I was just struck by the molality of the video, you know, filming from the air, you being on the water, and focusing on the land. So I just wanted to ask you, what was the kind of inspiration behind the flowers being placed in the water?
COCO FUSCO: Because it's a ritual in Latin America and in Spain to memorialize the dead by throwing flowers in the sea. It's even in Cuba, they do this for like Camilo Cienfuegos'-- the anniversary of his death. The schoolchildren have to go out and do it. But it's not always a kind of state-orchestrated thing. Very often, it's a private ritual that family members of people will go to the seaside on the anniversary of the death and put flowers in the water to remember them.
SPEAKER 6: Thank you.
SPEAKER 7: Good evening. I'm a performance student, like a student of Emilio Rojas right there. One funny thing is that he said, you can ask her any question. But don't ask her about A Couple in a Cage. So I won't do that.
[LAUGHTER]
One thing, I come from Barcelona. So for me, MACBA is like another home. And it's sad that I didn't see your work there.
COCO FUSCO: It was there. This piece was-- Your Eyes Will Be was there for months last year.
SPEAKER 7: Yeah, yeah, it angers me. OK, so my question would be-- more specific like, specifically into performance art and in relation to documentation, when you are working with creating this performance art that obviously, for example, in the piece presented now, it's a video essay. But at the same time, the act of rowing around the island is very performative, no? You could almost isolate that act as a performance.
So your artistic process, how do you try to bridge these processes of documentation and as well these performative acts into this cohesive artwork. Well, that's a very complicated question. And I actually teach courses on this.
It's not something that I could answer in just a few sentences. I think that what I try to-- what I try to avoid is what I call the zombie art school aesthetic of performance documentation, which is just put the camera down and you do something in front of the camera. And then you sell that as an artwork, right? I mean, it made sense to do that in the '70s when people's access to equipment was really not that extensive and they're just beginning to experiment with working with video. And so on and so forth.
But at this point in time where there's just so many options, it just-- I'm always trying to encourage students to just like move. The thing about the moving image is that it's a moving image, you guys, OK? It is not like-- don't make just tableau vivant just because you studied painting for a long time before you came to a performance class. You're not necessarily making a painting. So you have a camera. You can move, right? And you can move too, right?
So I try to get my students to think about what it means to have the camera move and you move. And then the next level is to think about imaging technology modalities. That's something that I've been very interested in. I've made pieces that are about my performances that look like reality TV, that look like surveillance camera footage, that look like-- well, the Couple in the Cage is more like an ethnographic documentary.
I tried to think about what kind of form, right, what kind of televisual or digital form corresponds to the kind of action that I'm creating, right? And also how can then I give the document a life as an artwork separate from the performance itself, right?
Right now I'm working on a piece called Antigone is Not Available about that Antigone is fed up because we really like tyrants and she doesn't want to go back on stage anymore or let anybody else use her likeness. But I'm doing it as a Zoom, fake Zoom conversation, right?
So I actually got an iPhone 14 and shot every interlocutor with the phone so that it would have the look of what does it look like when you're talking on Zoom or WhatsApp right. And then I'll jazz it up a little bit in the editing. Because it would be boring to just sit there and watch a real Zoom conversation.
But I could quote certain things. And I have intercom security Cam video incorporated into it and just a little-- like a few other kinds of video messaging included in the dynamic of the performance. But it was, I began with-- what form am I going to use here, right? And I was like, OK, This time, I'm going to do Zoom because so much of my life during COVID and after COVID has become about Zoom.
So much teaching was on Zoom. Lecturing was on Zoom. And now even like my faculty meetings are all on Zoom. And then all this-- my conversations with friends, nobody talks on the phone anymore. But we do talk on Zoom. So I just, I was like, OK, I'm going to play with Zoom, right? Now I don't know what I'll do next.
But I think that I mean that's me, right? I can't make everybody do what I do. That's not the point of teaching is to produce copies of myself. But I can at least get students to think in a more expanded way about how to use the process of documentation to create a work.
SPEAKER 8: Hi. So I just had a really quick question, so I guess that's good. It was like going back to the flowers, I actually thought it was a really beautiful memento, too that like symbolism of like memorializing the dead. I was curious as to if there was an intention on how many you chose to throw into the water. Because I know that we were talking about how there is an estimated million bodies. I don't expect a million flowers.
COCO FUSCO: Right.
SPEAKER 8: And there's also an homage to--
COCO FUSCO: Well, there's---
SPEAKER 8: --your friend.
COCO FUSCO: I was thinking specifically about people that died of COVID. So the million is over more than 100 years, right? And I wouldn't have been able to get. I mean, basically, sometimes, it's about logistics and material realities. I had to go to flower shops all over Brooklyn to get all the white flowers. Because I needed to have a color contrast.
This is like, these are formal decisions, right? The water's wasn't so blue. We actually played with color correction to make it look more blue than it was. It's the East River. It's kind of nasty. So to make it blue, but I was like, OK, I need a color contrast. You need to see the flowers, right? And you need to see the flowers and not be me. I'm in Black. The flowers are white. The water is blue, right?
So and then I had to go to every flower shop. I could find and buy every white flower they had and that's basically what I did the day before was I went, actually, the morning of so that they would still be fresh. I just went to seven flower shops around looking with Google Maps. Where are they, right? And how many of-- you have white carnations, great. You've got white, this one, great. You got gladiolas, wonderful. And I just bought what I could find and then started throwing them in the water.
SPEAKER 1: Thank you so much.
COCO FUSCO: Thank you all for coming.
[APPLAUSE]
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Cuban American artist and writer Coco Fusco discusses the research that went into the creation of her 2021 video work “Your Eyes Will Be an Empty Word,” on view at the Johnson Museum of Art (September 16, 2023–January 7, 2024). Fusco is a professor of art at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art.
Fusco shot footage of the waters around Hart Island, which is home to the largest mass grave in the United States and where New York’s unclaimed victims of Covid-19 have been buried. The film evolved from research that Fusco conducted about the history of artistic representation of plagues and other epidemics of infectious diseases.
This talk is the first major program cosponsored by the Johnson Museum and the Public History Initiative (PHI), based in the Department of History in the College of Arts & Sciences at Cornell University, highlighting how artists explore themes of history, memory, and the archive through their work. Gemma Rodrigues, Ames Director of Education and Curator of the Global Arts of Africa at the Johnson Museum, and Stephen Vider, associate professor of history at the University of Connecticut and founding director of PHI, introduce the artist.
The Findlay Family Lecture is funded by a generous gift from the Findlay Family Foundation. Fusco’s visit was made possible in part by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature, with additional support from the Cornell University Department of Art.
