The Couple in the Cage

The “Couple in the Cage” was an exhibition called “ A Savage Performance” curated by Coco Fusco and Guillermo Gomez-Pena. The exhibition was displayed across several European countries and some states in the United States. In the video, we see both Coco and Guillermo in a cage. They carry them around in the cage. The audience feeds them through the cage and takes pictures with them. In the trailer, we also see interviews with the audience. The video also juxtaposes old footages of exhibitions alongside this exhibition. Both characters are dressed in stereotypical attire. There are both characters because they decided to put on a show. The exhibition is not real and the tribe they told the audience they came from is not real. This trailer is part of a longer documentary, which goes into more details about the cities they visited, and commentary from the audience watching. The theories I will be employing in this analysis are ethnography, displaying the other in reference Sara Baartman and the politics of exhibiting.
Professor LaFleur in lecture on November 11 mentioned, “Museums were extremely powerful in shaping the way people saw the world” (Lecture 007). This same reasoning is why Fusco and Pena embark on this ethnographic journey. By displaying “A Savage Performance”, we see that they are subverting the past notions of ethnography. Ethnographic museums as the ones Sara Baartman was displayed in served a purpose and created a certain kind of discourse. “Discourse do not simply reflect reality, or innocently designate objects; rather they constitute them in specific contexts according to particular relations of power” (Lidchi, p. 185). Lidchi goes on to say that ethnography was created by the dominant culture in the imperial c...

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...amic shifts because first Coco Fusco and Guilermo Gomez-Pena put themselves on display. There was no outer force controlling them, they were in charge of whatever narratives were being told to the public. We notice in the video that the camera is mostly on the audience throughout the clip. It shows that the audience is the “subject” of the film. While the spectators think the specimens are on display, they are the ones being watched. We observe their behaviors throughout the documentary. We the viewers are looking in on them. Power is in the hands of the “natives” as opposed to the ethnography and bodies displayed in the past.
In conclusion, “A Couple in the Cage” is a throwback to past ethnographic fairs and museums that were used to degrade the natives in the past. Finally, watching this video today calls into question the treatment faced by natives in the past.