Coco Fusco: I Learned to Swim on Dry Land

Entitled “I Learned to Swim on Dry Land” – the first line of Virgilio Piñera’s microfiction “Swimming” (1957) – the exhibition centres on the word, the symbolic use of silence, and the inversion of language in relation to power. At its core lies Cuban poetry and literature, explored through voices of dissident figures including Virgilio Piñera, María Elena Cruz Varela, Heberto Padilla, and Néstor Díaz de Villegas, together with artists such as Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara and musician Maykel Osorbo, all of whom experienced repression. Their lives and works form an audiovisual, performative and documentary journey that reflects on post-revolutionary Cuba, ideas of revolution, and homeland.

The project also examines the role of the United States, its immigration policies, the rise of the right wing, and enduring structural monoculture. Materials from the artist’s research, including the books “English is Broken Here” (1995) and “Dangerous Moves: Performance and Politics in Cuba” (2015), as well as the exhibition “Only Skin Deep” (2001–03), highlight this trajectory.

A landmark collaboration with Guillermo Gómez-Peña, “The Couple in the Cage” (1992–93), revealed contrasting responses: audiences mistook the fictional Guatinau characters for real, while intellectuals debated the performance’s moral implications. Intended as satire on exoticism and primitivism, it exposed the museum as a producer of otherness. Since the 1980s, Coco Fusco’s work continues to question colonial histories, interrogate systems of identity, and critique the institutional frameworks that shape cultural meaning.