Two Unknown Native Americans by Coco Fusco and Guillermo G?mez-Peña is a daring experiment in a show whose successes and failures arise from the same aspect of the show : its tendency to blur the boundaries between the audience and the performers. When Two Undiscovered Amerindians succeeds, its presentation of an ethnographic exhibit causes its audience to question their complicity in the history of colonialism, whether or not they take the exhibit literally. When the show fails, it so completely misleads its audience that they can ignore its message against colonialism and substitute their own contradictory or unrelated interpretation. Both reactions are made possible by Fusco and Gámez-Peña's decision to almost completely collapse the fourth wall and invite viewers to interact with the exhibition. This action, in Diana Taylor's terminology, reduces the "narrative" of an artistic performance to the "script" of a true ethnographic spectacle. The suspension of disbelief brought about by this collapse allows audience members to personally decide what the performance means, for better or worse. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get an original essay As seen in the documentary The Caged Couple: An Odyssey by Guatinaui and in Fusco's clarifying article “The another story of intercultural performance”, the performance gave rise to four categorically distinct reactions. The first, the one that Fusco and his collaborators intended and hoped to see, was an understanding of the satirical, but fundamentally anticolonial, nature of the fake human zoo. The second reaction, the one that makes up the bulk of the documentary, was expressed by viewers who did not consider the show to be fiction but nonetheless felt uncomfortable with the idea of ​​putting people in cages. Both of these reactions are defined as "successes" because they achieved Fusco and Gámez-Peña's goal of educating the museum-visiting masses about the Western world's cruel history of indigenous exploitation by pseudo-scientists. and impresarios. Moments where the performance “failed” were indicated by the audience's inability to grasp the performers' critical message. This happened in two ways, the first being what happened in Buenos Aires, when the public fell completely into the illusion of the spectacle, without any qualms about putting the "savages" in cages. The last possible reaction was the "moralistic" response, in which critics were more concerned with the ethics of deceiving these masses into believing a fake ethnographic show, than with the show's actual argument against our history unethical with submissive natives. The first two types of reactions qualify as successful because they follow the performers' goal of communicating an anti-exotic and anti-colonial sentiment to their audience. Fusco states that his "initial intention was to create a satirical commentary on Western concepts of society." An exotic and primitive Other” by creating “a surprise or ‘strange’ encounter, in which the audience had to undergo its own process of reflection on what it saw” (Fusco, 37, 40). She defines the notion of a successful performance as one that conveys the satirical anticolonial message and, perhaps more crucially, allows audiences to think seriously about their own relationships with colonialism. After all, faced with the "domesticated savage, many spectators felt entitled to assume the role of the colonizer, only to feel uncomfortable with the implications of thegame” (Fusco, 47). It doesn't matter that some viewers cannot see through the illusion, only that they consider why the exploitative spectacle of ethnographic exhibitions is unacceptable. In this sense, an effective performance of Two Undiscovered Amerindians affected audiences in the same way that Patricia Hoffbauer and George Emilio Sanchez's The Architecture of View did. When a socially conscious audience watches either performance, they see themselves implicated in the forces of history that produced the dehumanizing stereotypes on display. May Joseph, reviewer of both shows, infers that the “amusement park of minority archetypes” presented by Architecture and Two Undiscovered Native Americans should “suggest that a fundamental realignment of audience expectations…. . . needs to be done” (Joseph, 125). Fundamentally, this realignment sought by the performers is made possible “by blurring the roles of spectator and performer” (Joseph, 117). Members of the public are only empowered to change their biases once they are aware of their own role in implementing stereotypes. Only by breaking down traditional barriers between themselves and their viewers can Fusco, Gámez-Peña, Hoffbauer, and Sanchez effectively provoke their audiences into deep reflection on the history of oppression they satirically present . The problem with barrier-breaking performativity is that it can encourage audience thinking to such an extent that the audience misses the ironic message of the performance. In the case of Two Undiscovered Native Americans, the specific reasons for this misinterpretation can be found in Diana Taylor's view of the performance as one in a long line of colonial "discovery scenarios." Although the satirical intent of Two Undiscovered Amerindians was clear to most critics, it was lost on many viewers. So it's helpful to interpret the show on a superficial level, in order to decipher why its themes have been so often misunderstood. Taylor examines what made an ethnographic spectacle so appealing to colonial audiences and, therefore, what made Two Undiscovered Amerindians likely to be interpreted at first glance as a true ethnographic spectacle. Taylor first defines a fundamental paradigm of ethnography as the “scenario of discovery,” a kind of non-narrative performance that “normalizes the extraordinary conceit” of “undiscovered otherness” (Taylor, 54). She uses Columbus's descriptions of his first encounters with the indigenous peoples of the Caribbean as an archetypal example of these "discovery scenarios." In the Columbus scenario, we see two crucial elements of Fusco and Gámez-Peña's performance: the "mimesis" of Western culture by the "natives" and the assumption of "reciprocity" by the audience in the communication of Others who do not speak (Taylor, 60). These elements are captured in the archive of public reactions, Paula Heredia's documentary The Caged Couple: A Guatinaui Odyssey. In the film, the audience of Two Unknown Native Americans becomes the performers, and their performance of believing in the script shows how the original performance failed to get its message across. Taylor's idea of ​​mimesis is expressed by interviewed audience members who marveled at how Native American characters could dress in modern clothing and engage in Western behaviors, such as watching television and listening to music popular (Heredia). They assumed that these “savages” were inclined to mime in the same way as Columbus’s audience. They dehumanized the characters of Fusco and Gámez-Peña byassuming that their appropriation of Western fashion and behavior was an act of parrot imitation rather than an expression of free will. The assumption of reciprocal communication was observed in the reactions of audience members who believed they could interpret G?mez-Pe?a's nonsensical language or the nonverbal communication of either artist. Some interviewees claimed they could understand Gámez-Peña's gibberish Spanish "ancestral story" arc, without really understanding what his words meant, while others tried to interpret the emotional relationships or sexual between the two non-speaking characters. and themselves (Heredia). These two hypotheses show that some spectators were completely drawn into the colonial scenario. Employing the same two tactics highlighted in Taylor's analysis of the 1492 narrative, audiences interpreted Fusco and Gámez-Peña's colonial fantasy into reality. In a way, this total immersion fulfilled Fusco's intention to create "a white screen onto which the audience projected their fantasies", but the main aim of the piece, to inspire self-reflection on shared history, was thwarted by the public's inability to reflect on their colonial behavior (Fusco, 47). Taylor concludes that "the purpose of the performance was to highlight, rather than normalize, the theatricality of colonialism", but because such enactments are almost identical in both sincerely colonial and satirically anticolonial scenarios. , it is easy to see how an uninformed audience, without knowledge of the show's fiction, could confuse the two (Taylor, 71). The show's tendency to blur fiction and reality, a tendency that had previously allowed viewers to reconsider their views on "wild" stereotypes, reinforced the audience's cultural prejudices. The resulting "normalization" of colonial theatricality is a dangerous misinterpretation that can only result from an audience so immersed in the seductive interactivity of a performance, or even in its pure credibility, that they cannot see the satire of the spectacle. For this same reason, the spectacle trumping the satire, a part of the audience of Two Undiscovered Amerindians responded without skepticism or conviction, but with moral indignation. Just as she was surprised to see some observers believing the fiction she had created, Fusco was astonished to find that "a significant number of intellectuals, artists, and cultural bureaucrats sought to divert attention from the substance from [the performance] towards the “morality” of the show. implications' of . . . “misinform the public”” (Fusco, 37). These social elites had the education to see the satirical bent of Two Undiscovered Native Americans, but chose to overlook the show's message in order to criticize its form. Much like the masses who believed in the existence of the Guatinauis, the elites reacted literally to the methods of representation, which they considered "offensive to the public, bad for children, and dishonestly diverting the educational responsibilities of their museums" (Fusco, 51 Again). , the show failed to get its message across because, as audience reactions reveal, its anticolonial structure was overshadowed by its unstructured dialogue between audience and performer. The open and “fuzzy” performativity of Two Undiscovered Native Americans is a double-. sharp sword: it alternately facilitates and obstructs the message of the show. On the one hand, the intrusion of the performers into the audience prevented static observation of the show; on the contrary, it catalyzed opinions on the ethics of ethnographic demonstrations. From another..