Saturday, March 1st - 7pm

Program Five:
Coco Fusco: Operation Atropos

Screening followed by a Q & A with the artist.

Coco Fusco created "Operation Atropos" in 2006, as preparation for a performance piece about women in the military involved in interrogation, particularly in the atrocities committed at the Abu Ghraib prison. The artist hired a firm manned by former intelligence interrogators from the U.S. military to simulate the methods used to elicit information. Fusco and fellow female volunteers are filmed preparing for and being subjected to these techniques as well as later using the same methods to attempt to pry information from their former captors. Although the participants and the viewers of the video are all cognizant that these are basically role-playing activities, tensions and emotions arise, heightened by the camera work and documentary nature of the piece.

Coco Fusco: Operation Atropos
2006, USA, 59:00 Minutes

In July 2005, I took a course led by former US military interrogators designed for people in the private sector who want to learn their techniques for extracting information. I took a group of six women with me and filmed our workshop. The video, which premiered in March 2006 at MC Projects in Los Angles, is about our learning experience. The training involved an immersive simulation of being prisoners of war: we were ambushed, captured, stripped searched, thrown in the pen and subject to several interrogations. Afterwards, in a classroom scenario, the tactics used against us were analyzed and we were taught to do what had been done to us.

Biography:
Coco Fusco is a New York-based interdisciplinary artist, writer and an associate professor at Columbia University. She has performed, lectured, exhibited and curated around the world since 1988. She is a recipient of a 2003 Herb Alpert Award in the Arts. Fusco's performances and videos have been included in such events as the Sydney Biennale, The Johannesburg Biennial, The Kwangju Biennale, The Shanghai Biennale, InSite O5, Transmediale, The London International Theatre Festival, VideoBrasil and Performa05. She is the author of English is Broken Here: Notes on Cultural Fusion in the Americas (1995) and The Bodies that Were Not Ours and Other Writings (2001), and A Field Guide for Female Interrogators (2008). She is also the editor of Corpus Delecti: Performance Art of the Americas (1999)and Only Skin Deep: Changing Visions of the American Self (2003).

Fusco's work combine electronic media and performance in a variety of formats, from staged multi-media performances incorporating large scale projections and closed circuit television to live performances streamed to the internet that invite audiences to chart the course of action through chat interaction. Her most recent work deals with the role of female interrogators in the War on Terror. Those works include Operation Atropos (a film about interrogation training), and A Room of One's Own (a monologue about female interrogators). These works have been selected for the 2008 Whitney Biennial.

Text: Coco Fusco, http://www.cocofusco.com
Reprinted with permission by Coco Fusco.