Dolores from 10 to 10Coco Fusco’s work combines 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. These works include Operation Atropos (a film about interrogation training), and A Room of One’s Own (a monologue about female interrogators).
For her installation at Project Row Houses, Dolores from 10 to 10 (1998) is installed in the two story building on Holman Street. In the summer of 1998, on a research trip to Tijuana, Mexico, Coco Fusco met Delfina Rodriguez, a maquiladora (factory assembly line) worker who had been accused by her employer of trying to start a union in the plant. To coerce her into resigning, her manager had locked her in a room without food, water, bathroom or phone for twelve hours. She had signed a letter of resignation under duress and then, once she was released, she sued her former employer for violation of her civil rights. Her boss told the judge that she was insane, that nothing had happened and that she had no proof. Rodriguez’s co-workers were afraid to testify on her behalf. Fusco was convinced that there must have been surveillance cameras recording what happened to her during her internment. Dolores from 10 to 10 is Fusco’s interpretation of what the cameras saw.
Coco Fusco is a New York-based interdisciplinary artist, writer and Chair of the Fine Art Department at Parsons/The New School for Design. 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 was also featured in the 2008 Whitney Biennial.
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