
In 1990, the two, together with Mexican-American artist René Yáñez, began their collaboration, creating Norte/Sur, a multidisciplinary art installation that exposed the connections and disconnections between the United States and Latin America. For example, Fusco had explored the impact of slavery and racism in Cuba, while Gómez-Peña founded the Border Art Workshop/Taller de Arte Fronterizo to create collaborative art projects with migrant communities along the US-Mexico border. Cuban-American interdisciplinary artist and writer Coco Fusco and Chicano performance artist, writer, and educator Guillermo Gómez-Peña joined forces and talents in the early 1990s to discuss the unbalanced relations between the regions that make up the Americas and the complexities of what it means for those individuals who reside between cultures and languages.īefore they began their collaboration, both artists were already invested in exploring histories of colonialism, racism, and the impact of geopolitical and affective borders in their art. But when the nodal point of collaborative projects dwells in mixed and border-crossing identity politics, and in the pervasiveness of colonial mindsets in current dehumanizing practices, artistic partnerships become acts of resistance. “CHOQUE CULTURAL CULTURE SHOCK RUPTURA RUPTURE VIOLACION RAPE GENOCIDIO GENOCIDE.”Ĭollaboration in the arts and performance usually emerges from the desire to harmonize voices and visions, signaling both the nuances that differentiate creative approaches and the similarities that bring them together.
