This is the very first time I've had the opportunity to present my work in Italy and I'm very happy to do so.
What I thought would make the most sense for me to do would be to present documentary material on a number of different projects that I've done in the last five years, projects where I specifically play with the line between facts and fiction. I think that working in performance art has given me the opportunity to manipulate that very thin line in some very interesting ways, and that's the main reason that I've continued to work within that medium. Part of the process for creating the work for me is something I call "reverse ethnography", in which I study audience response. So two of the excerpts I will present are from the studies I did on audience response to my work. The other part of the process, before or during the performance, is to do field work or archival research to develop a piece. Another one of the accounts is from field work where I get the facts before turning them into fiction.
I have been exploring identity in my work as a performance artist, writer and curator for over a decade. Since 1990, my formal concerns have related to the performative dynamics of intercultural action, which is to say, how our sense of ourselves is produced through interpersonal exchange and how the discourses of consumerism, tourism, popular media and technology affect our perceptions of others. I turned to performance after growing frustrated with the inadequacies of so-called rational discourse to deal with a problem as irrational as racism. I began developing inter-disciplinary art projects about the relation of North-South dynamics in 1989.
"Norte: Sur" from 1990 was a collaboration with Guillermo Gómez-Peña. It was an examination of the "Americanization" of Latin America and the "Latinization" of the US. We were exploring popular culture and tourism. In 1991 we began a series of projects about the Quincentenary, the so-called discovery of America. One of the projects was a solo piece I did called "La Chavela Realty Company" in which I appeared in the Brooklyn Academy of Music lobby as the ghost of Queen Isabel la Catolica, selling the land of America to anyone who had a dollar. As part of an ongoing project, Guillermo Gómez-Peña and I developed a series of characters and one of mine was called La Cabrona Anacaona. She was the last indigenous ruler of what is now the Dominican Republic, and she supposedly gave Christopher Columbus a very hard time. The mask she's carrying is not actually from the Dominican Republic but is from Mexico. It's a mask used for the dance El Baile de la Conquista which combines the sexual and political themes of the conquest.

From 1992 to 1994 we carried out "Two Undiscovered Amerindians Visit the West", which used the Quincentenary as a springboard to explore how notions of the primitive derived from ethnography had seeped into popular Western notions of the Other. And for this performance we did an enormous amount of research into ethnographic displays, in which people from Africa, Asia and the indigenous people of America were put on display in aristocratic salons, museums, laboratories and also as exotic oddities in public places, in parks and squares. I wrote an essay called "The Other History of Intercultural Performance" which I will now read from:
"In the early 1900s, Franz Kafka wrote a story that began, 'Honoured members of the Academy! You have done me the honour of inviting me to give your Academy an account of the life I formerly led as an ape.' Entitled 'A Report to an Academy,' it was presented as the testimony of a man from the Gold Coast of Africa who had lived for several years on display in Germany as a primate. That account was fictitious and created by a European writer who stressed the irony of having to demonstrate one's humanity; yet it is one of many literary allusions to the real history of ethnographic exhibition of human beings that has taken place in the West over the past five centuries. While the experiences of many of those who were exhibited is the stuff of legend, it is the accounts by observers and impresarios that constitute the historical and literary record of this practice in the West. My collaborator, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, and I were intrigued by this legacy of performing the identity of an Other for a white audience, sensing its implications for us as performance artists dealing with cultural identity in the present. Had things changed, we wondered? How would we know, if not by unleashing those ghosts from a history that could be said to be ours? Imagine that I stand before you then, as did Kafka's character, to speak about an experience that falls somewhere between truth and fiction. What follows are my reflections on performing the role of a noble savage behind the bars of a golden cage.
Our original intent was to create a satirical commentary on Western concepts of the exotic, primitive, Other; yet, we had to confront two unexpected realities in the course of developing this piece: 1) a substantial portion of the public believed that our fictional identities were real ones; and 2) a substantial number of intellectuals, artists, and cultural bureaucrats sought to deflect attention from the substance of our experiment to the 'moral implications' of our dissimulation, or in their words, our 'misinforming the public' about who we were. The literalism implicit in the interpretation of our work by individuals representing the 'public interest' bespoke their investment in positivist notions of 'truth' and depoliticized, ahistorical notions of 'civilization.' This 'reverse ethnography' of our interactions with the public will, I hope, suggest the culturally specific nature of their tendency toward a literal and moral interpretation."
Now, as part of the project we made a video documentary about the audience response so let me just show you a couple of other images from the piece and then we can play the video. We performed this project nine times in Europe (in Spain and England), in the US (in many museums of natural history), and in Australia (in a museum of natural history) and in Buenos Aires, in Argentina. We chose places that had a specific historical connection to this practice, or else natural history museums that had also been implied in the practice.
Now, we created a fictional identity; we did not try to represent a real indigenous group. We said we came from an island in the Gulf of Mexico that had never been discovered and that we were coming to the West to be discovered as part of the Quincentenary celebrations, and we said we didn't understand any Western language, so we had to have docents who would explain our identities and activities to the audience, and would explain to the public who we were and also to feed us and take us to the bathroom. In each place we did the performance for two or three days, when we were outside, all day until dark, and when we were inside, according to the hours of the museum. And each time we had two signs next to the cage, one with information about our ethnic group which was like a parody of what you'd find in an old-style encyclopaedia, with a fake map, and the other sign was a list of all the history of ethnographic displays that we'd been able to find, and this was signed with our names as the artists. But very few people made that connection that the people in the cage were the same ones who had signed this list.
Now, I should clarify. When I say that people believed it or that some people believed it, I don't mean that they believed it forever. I mean that belief was one stage of reception. Some people stayed around for a long time and had conversations with others, and came to certain conclusions. And also, in some cities we were on television, there were news reports about the piece in which it was revealed that we were artists making this up, and that it wasn't real. But it was important to us to maintain the integrity of the fiction, so that the audience would have to figure it out for themselves.

In 1994 and 95, we created another piece called "Mexarcane International: Ethnic Talent for Export." We were interested in continuing to work with audiences who did not plan to see art or performance, and also to go into spaces where people have anticipation of a certain kind of spectacle that may not be artistic. In the United States in the early 90s there was an extensive debate about shopping malls as the new, privatised public space. So we designed this piece to be presented in shopping malls and we performed it in Toronto, Canada, and London, for the International Festival of Theatre, and in Glasgow, Scotland. We said that we were representatives from a multinational corporation that was going to present and promote exotica for special events, and we arrived in the shopping malls to conduct market research to determine local consumer tastes for the exotic.
So supposedly I was the secretary of the corporation, and here I am interviewing a potential consumer. I would ask questions about their taste for foreign travel, foreign lovers, foreign food and foreign consumer goods of all kinds. But the possibilities for responses were limited in the form of multiple choice questionnaires, to mirror the logic of the shopping mall as a spectacle that provides the illusion of satisfaction but actually limits desire. And supposedly on the basis of their responses I would direct them to Guillermo, in a glass box, who would perform what they would most like to see, what I had determined they would most like to see. In reality, there was no relationship at all, but many people stayed around for a couple of hours trying to figure out what they had said that had induced the performance they saw.
So after these projects, I decided to focus more specifically on the role of Latin women in the global economy. I am currently studying the situation of Latin women who work in the maquilladoras which are the assembly plants at the US-Mexico border and the Caribbean. Prior to this I developed another piece about Latin women and tourism. I was looking at the development of stereotypes of Latin women as oversexed, and on the other hand to the idealization of Latin women as vestiges of pre-colonial wisdom, the matriarchs, since both of these constructs are deployed by the tourist industries in Latin America. Out of research that I conducted on sex tourism in Cuba and cultural tourism in Mexico, I created my performance Stuff which is a collaboration with the Mexican American artist Nao Bustamante. As part of our process of developing the piece we did some archival research on the history of representation of Latin women as prostitutes from the turn of the century onwards: those images come out as soon as tourism on a mass scale begins in Latin America. And Nao and I organized our script around banquets, rituals, dance lessons and erotically charged language lessons, because we wanted to make a satire of the servidora, the servidora of sex and spirituality at the same time.
So in this performance, we brought people from the audience with us to the stage to perform with us. In one scene I teach them how to pray during the banquet, and Nao does a ritualized dance with a kitchen knife. In another we teach a sex tourist how to pick us up in Spanish.
My mother's side of the family is Cuban, and I have done work in Cuba with other artists there for the last twelve or thirteen years. In 1996, I went to do research on the growing sex tourism industry on the island — the return of sex tourism to the island, because it was famous for this in the 1950s and now it's famous for this again. I wrote a story about my interaction with the sex workers that was published in the United States and Spain, and then I used some of the interviews for sections of the performances. Nao and I combined parts of this information with phrases from guide-books for sex tourists. All the attractions on stage with the sex tourists are based on phrases on the actual books that real people use to pick up women in Cuba.
I will read you a little bit of the story that I wrote, which is one interview that I did with two women. I interviewed women who I consider to be in different categories of the practice — the high class prostitutes, the ones on the street, and children. This is the section from the women on the street:
"The only way I can confirm my suspicion that the familiar prostitution narrative of victimization and abuse doesn't tell the whole truth about the Cuban jineteras is for me to find some veterans of the trade who treat sex as a job —"

"I decided to hit the streets myself in La Habana Vieja to get the perspective of prostitutes who were in the business long before the recent explosion. Nestled around the Havana port area, La Habana Vieja is the most heavily touristed neighborhood of the city, and also happens to be one of its poorest, famous for illegal activity.
At the Plaza de la Catedral, Paco, a mischievous looking street hustler, is whispering in my ear. 'Where are you from, linda?' 'La Juma,' I say, using Cuban slang for the United States. He laughs, 'Let me show you some great discos tonight.' He grabs my arm. 'Sorry,' I tell him, 'I'm busy tonight, but could you tell me where the best pizza is around here?' He takes me to a paradar. He's mulato, 24, and has lived in this neighbourhood his entire life. 'How about tonight?' he keeps on saying.
'Look, Paco, I'm not some wacky Canadian who came down here to get laid by a prieto,' I tell him. He cracks up. 'I don't sell myself,' he whispers coyly. 'Fine,' I say, 'You want to work? Find me two jineteras who are good at talking.' He looks completely unphased. 'That's my speciality,' he tells me, with a smile.
We strolled past the cathedral towards the Malecon, Havana's waterfront boulevard that wraps around half the city. I ask him to tell me about his clients. He's getting more requests for younger girls, he says, including a recent one from a man from the Dominican Republic who was offering $2,000 for a girl under 14 'without a scratch.' Some perverts come through here looking for kids who will give them blowjobs for a couple of bucks. 'They pay with lollipops,' he says, shaking his head.
'Are you enjoying fooling me?' I said. 'Mi amiga! I swear it's true!' he says, putting his hand over his heart to make a point. 'I know you're not going to believe this but there are all kinds of guys showing up here now that the word is out. It's not just the old guys who want it. It's handicapped guys, midgets, guys missing limbs, you name it. I saw a delegation of men in wheelchairs in the lobby of the Hotel Nacional surrounded by a delegation of teenage mulatas.' 'Where do you send your jineteras with the clients?' I asked. 'I rent rooms in the neighbourhood.' 'What about the cops?' 'What about them? They like fula —' which is Cuban slang for a dollar, ' —They like fula too, like everyone else.'
An hour later I'm standing at our agreed upon corner when I see Paco's head pop out of a doorway. I slip into a solar and he introduces me to Helen and Margarita, both in their late 20's, and both of whom had been working the streets of la Habana Vieja for over ten years. Margarita had a young son whom she supports, while Helen lived alone.
When they first started, Margarita explained, their main clients were merchant marines and foreign technicians. At that time, dollar possession was illegal, so they would hide their money in their vaginas and get visiting African students to buy consumer goods for them in the dollar shops. They were careful not to be too ostentatious so as not encourage envy that might lead someone to inform on them. They were lucky and had never been arrested, but they have friends in jail.
They said at least two thirds of the young women in the barrio are jineteras. When I ask what the men in the neighbourhood think about it, they both laughed.
'They see the gallego (Spaniard) coming in with a girl, and they don't see him,' says Helen. 'They see a chicken, beans, rice—a full fridge.'
What did come across clearly in our conversation is these women's sense of what constitutes fairness in dealings with clients—and their willingness to defend their sense of their own rights as women providing a service.
'The guys sometimes show up with bags of bras and underwear, thinking that's enough to get us into bed,' says Helen with a smirk. 'There are a lot more younger guys coming now, and they try to tell you it's for amore, amore...'
Sensing that I was dealing with sophisticated traffickers in fantasy as much as sex, I asked them to classify their clientele according to tastes.
Helen and Margarita leaned towards me, as if we are high schoolers engaging juicy gossip.
'Look, the Italians are the ones coming here most now, and they like tortilleria (lesbian sex),' they begin. 'The Mexicans used to come a lot, but since the peso devaluation they don't show up that much anymore. They used to ask for marathon sessions of oral sex. It was awful!' exclaimed Margarita. 'The Spaniards tend to be older,' Helen added. 'Some of them just want to talk. Others want to come and live with us for a while. I used to bring guys home with me for a week at a time. They loved it, and didn't mind the blackouts and water shortages. They'd show me pictures of their wives. Now though, most guys want a different girl every night.'
I told them about the image of jineteras outside the island, that they are often described as brash tarts with bleached blond hair and stretch pants. Helen was wearing a white sweater, loose fitting white pants and a tan jacket, with a little white cap. Margarita had on jeans, a light blue pullover and plastic earrings. Neither of them have colored their hair. If anything, explained Margarita, 'the natural look is back. Even the white girls are perming their hair so they look more like mulatas.' Both acknowledged that styles cater to client tastes. 'The Spaniards really like black girls with braids, so all the negritas are wearing their hair like that now. The Italians like mulatas with wild hair.'
What about the possible dangers? The only case of violence they could think of was the 1993 case of a jinetera who was impaled on a mop by a European tourist who then threw her body from the balcony of one of the hotels in the Vedado. Of course, the murderer was out of the country before the jinetera's body was found. Health risks? Helen and Margarita immediately answered that they insisted on condoms, and that health was the one thing that the government still had under control. Knowing about the declining conditions in Cuba's hospitals, and chronic shortages of medicine, I wondered if they were not just convincing themselves that the old revolutionary promises still work just to ward off fears. No one I spoke to throughout my entire trip wanted to accept the idea that an STD epidemic, including but not limited to AIDS was in the making, which seemed to me an almost criminal oversight.
When I asked them if they ever think about getting out of the business, Helen told me a story that perfectly illustrated the dilemmas facing Cuban women who've been socialized to believe in their equality but who now faced an extremely polarized world that leaves them little room to maneuver in.
'I got married once,' she confessed with a wry smile. 'But it didn't work. I thought I'd go to Spain and start a new life. I thought I would work, and that we would live together. But he was nuts, crazy,' she continued. 'He wanted to keep me at home all day. He wouldn't let me work or go out. I lasted two months, and then I realized that I had to get out. I sat him down with his mother and explained. I had no money, and no place to go, so I had to come back here. He's so mad that he won't even give me a divorce now because he says it's too expensive.'"
I'll go on to another project I did in South Africa for the 1997 Johannesburg Biennale. In 1995 I was invited to the first international art biennial in Johannesburg as a guest speaker. Held less than a year after the country's first democratic elections, it was intended to mark South Africa's new presence in the international cultural arena, after decades of isolation brought about by the boycott in protest of apartheid. I jumped at the opportunity to visit a place that had wielded tremendous symbolic power over me since my college years.
As a young person, I had been terrified by apartheid; it was more than a reminder of what America had once been like. In my mind it meant the symbolic annihilation of what I understood myself to be, a mixed race child in a culturally hybrid society that was only beginning to accept its heterogeneity. My first visit was exhilarating because I could sense the euphoria that characterises societies that have just undergone a radical transformation. However, it was also extremely depressing, an encounter with a very polarized world where the psychological and economic fissures that had taken root under apartheid were still palpable in every aspect of life. I was very saddened by witnessing the degree by which racial fear shaped everyday interactions and the extent to which white guilt had to be handled with extreme delicacy by blacks to protect the economic future of the entire country. So I began to think of ways to creatively intervene in the situation by proposing a project for the second biennial.
The theme of the second biennial was "Trade Routes: History and Geography". For my project I decided to deal with internal rather than external migration. I worked with the passbooks that blacks and coloured people were forced to carry under apartheid in order to circulate in white areas. The passbook was the document that mostly clearly conveyed the apartheid philosophy of legal and racial inferiority of blacks. In them, individuals were identified by name, number, homeland and racial group. The evidence of a link to a white employer which justified black people's movement outside their homeland was also listed. This ID had to be shown to police on request and also had to be used to claim goods and services from the South African government, and also to prove payment of taxes. A failure to carry one could lead to arrest.
The following is a Zulu poem about the passbooks. Once one of oral culture, it was given to me by a drama coach who is leading a workshop for children in Soweto and is teaching them the poem:

Take a visit to Johannesburg
You will see big crowds of people in prison for special pass
Forward, onward to Marshall Square
Produce your special pass.
It was a sad sight to see our people like that, caught for special pass. There comes the big van
All over the country they call it the pick-up van
There's the pick-up,
there's the big van
Where is your pass?
Where is your tax? Take off your hat!
What is your home name?
Who is your father?
Who is your chief?
Where did you pay your tax?
What river do you drink?
We mourn for our country

Now, though I was focusing on South African history, the idea of a document that designated racial difference of one particular racial group from the rest of the population and that automatically made its carrier an alien even in his native country was not unfamiliar. In the United States, members of federally recognised American Indian tribes have to show their passes to authorities to prove their status and claim their benefits, and resident aliens face the threat of automatic expulsion if they fail to produce a green card on request from the authorities. More generally, speaking in the era of globalization, it is the people of the Third World whose documents are heavily scrutinised when they enter the privileged zones of Europe and North America. My performance, which is called "Rites of Passage", was an attempt to deal with this form of social engineering by requiring that the biennial visitors be given passbooks and that they be stamped to permit circulation within the exhibition.
I set up an admission table at the main entrance, we dressed as South African police officers and directed visitors to have their photo taken at a booth behind us, and after doing this they would be interviewed by one of us to fill out their passes. The questions we asked were replicas of the old ones: we asked for name, ethnicity, residency, profession and their relation to the event, and they were stamped every time at the door by one of the guards, who were actually South African drama students.
Now, from my experience with earlier works, I knew that subjecting audience members to questioning could catalyse reflection on their own sense of pleasure and danger, pleasure and danger in relation to race, so they could understand how their likes and dislikes determine their paths in public space. This sort of performance expands upon minimalist sculpture, theatricalizing on public reception. But it shifts the focus of inquiry from the physical encounter with the sculptural object to the ideological structures of space and place. I chose to recreate the passbook scenario because I knew a performance that dramatized the process of constructing racial identity would generate what some people call "binary terror". That is, the frightening fantasy of not knowing what is what, of losing a sense of where reality ends so that fantasy begins. This for me is one of the great strengths of live performance and it is also the place where it dovetails with the phenomenology of the simulated and virtual spaces that dominate our current cultural landscape. It's where you experience something that's really real and not real at the same time. You really have to answer the questions, but it's not really apartheid.
So in this still divided society, one's reaction to the passbook would make manifest just how absurd the popular claim that racism had been transcended or eliminated was . How people responded to the piece had everything to do with who they thought they were. How they saw themselves and whether they thought they should be seen as having a visible identity at all. And though some people were enraged by the performance and they accused me of perpetrating the illusion that it was obligatory as a way of punishing them, many other visitors, white and black, looked at it as the opportunity to redesign their identities. To imagine themselves in a different way.
The first indication I got that this piece would take on a life of its own came shortly after I began, when the head of security, after first complaining that my guards were a nuisance, but then he changed his mind and decided that my passbooks were a good way to control theft. And much to the chagrin of the press, the old passbook pages for permits for firearms and drivers' licences that I changed to permits for carrying video recorders and cameras, came to life again.
It wasn't long before on the occasion of the opening night we had a huge crowd waiting impatiently for their passbooks, sulking, gesticulating and screaming complaints at roving cameramen who were documenting the opening. The noise and the density of the crowd and the dazed, confused look on many peoples' faces made me think of Ellis Island at the turn of the century. (Ellis Island is the island where the immigrants of Europe were received before entering the US). And as I worked frantically with two helpers to process the books, I noticed that we effectively made the same mistakes that officials of Ellis Island made that erased people's ties to their past. We changed names. We made up answers for people who responded too slowly, and we assigned them racial identities if they resisted answering this very sensitive question.
I was prepared to endure their annoyance, but nothing could prepare me for the looks on the white people's faces when I asked them their ethnic identity. I saw shock and shame and had to wait with a straight face long enough for them to recover and whisper "white". I saw the disdainful looks of some who would point to their faces rather than speak to me. And I felt the indignation of those who refused to answer or would growl "not applicable." I had to explain to many who did not appear to understand the difference between nationality and ethnicity in a multicultural society, that South Africa was not the right answer when I asked them about ethnic identity.
Many young adults in South Africa were clearly struggling with this issue. I heard some of them whisper, "Aren't we not supposed to say this anymore?" While others invoked the post-racial vocabulary of the new South Africa, calling themselves "Rainbow People." Many blacks stood and watched all this for a long period of time, giggling when a white person hesitated over the question.
After several people requested passbooks for Jesus Christ and Santa Claus, I realized that the best way to handle the tension that this generated was to encourage people to reinvent themselves as an escape. I was inviting them to "pass" which is what many black people in the US used to do to avoid being classified as black. I began to compile a list of fictional identities that they chose which included: alien, Martian, Jupiterian, Venutian, green, orange, Zulu, Christian, other; then in French: blanc or blanche, bleached, white fag, Hebrew and honorary black. A television reporter documented her own process of obtaining a passbook as Amish, and people, instead of giving me photos of their faces, gave me photographs of ears, exposed penises, stickers and hand-drawn self-portraits. Only Afrikaners, who have made the preservation of their culture and linguistic tradition part of their political project for decades, were consistently ready to give their true identities and some people collected one passbook per day to celebrate their fluid sense of self.
Several Latin American artists enjoyed coming up with new terms for mestizo or mixed race. One Mexican artist, Theresa Serrano, asked if she could be identified as "raza dudosa" or "doubtful race". A particularly frightening moment came when a middle-aged white South African woman brought a group of friends to my table, where in seconds the look on her face changed from curious and confused to wicked and playful.
"A pass, a pass," she kept on saying, until she decided, "Yes, a pass, but I'm going to be called Tikky." Tikky is a derogatory name for a black person or maid. And then she said, "And write down that I'm a cleaner." Then she went over to instruct all her friends to not use their real names but make up identities based on their memories of black people in the old South Africa.
Interestingly, no black South Africans appeared to be bothered by having to wait a long time or about having to identify him or herself. News spread among the black security workers and janitorial staff and they all came over to watch, and then create their own passes. Many of them told me that they were taking their books so that they could take home some historical memorabilia. One person said to show his grandchildren so they would remember, and other reactions were more tongue in cheek. The director of the Institute for Contemporary Art, who is a black woman, she borrowed my police uniform so she could photograph herself as a policewoman getting a pass, and several black artists, some from South Africa, others from other African countries, asked to be identified as Casos, Negroes, and even Niggers. Others called themselves post-national, diasporic, or global citizens. They all wanted to tell me their stories of being strip-searched and subjected to a rectal examination for being Colombian, or being held for hours in airports without explanation, and of being accused to carrying false documents if they were naturalised American, Canadian or Australian citizens or British subjects.
Perhaps the most unexpected and the greatest response came from the black South Africans who were helping me as the guards. I told them at the beginning what my ideas were of the piece and I gave them the uniforms and then I left them to interpret it as they saw fit. And once the crowds became more manageable, they began to assert their presence more forcefully. They began to greet visitors in Afrikaans, adopting the cadence and aggressive tones of the police who had harassed them once upon a time. "Outside is the new South Africa," they would say, "But inside is the old. So where is your pass?" Within hours I was called in and chastised by the public relations officer, who refused to see it as anything but a public relations headache and accused the guards of being a bunch of stoned Rastafarians.
But when I interviewed the guards at the end of the piece to get their version of the story, one of them explained to me, "Sister Coco, let me tell you what I like about this. You see that only white people complain here, not black people. They have never had to wait for anything. But we had to wait a long time. So this is just our sweet revenge."
Thank you very much.

Q: How does your work change in response to the audience's response?
A: Well, with the cage performance we started out with a much more vague idea of what to do with the piece. It became much more refined as we tested out different behaviour with the audience and saw what worked. So we changed our behaviour looking for certain kinds of responses, but also, for example, we learned that food was a very powerful things for people, that the spectacle of us being fed was much more powerful than we'd ever imagined. So we began to incorporate it much more into the performance. And in the shopping mall piece it was a really educational experience, as I asked them the questions. I learned a lot about what people like and don't like and I wanted to know. It helped me to design the next performance that dealt with tourism, and the kinds of questions to really focus in on.
But in each instance we were always working with responses that already exist in the culture, but trying to get people to understand how they shape our responses to other cultures. So it's the market research scenario, the ethnographic show scenario. We have a lot of very bad TV shows in America where people are forced to come up to the stage and participate and be test audiences for all kinds of markets, so there are already existing scenarios. In a way, because it makes it more comfortable for the audience if they're doing it in a structure that they already recognise and know how to do. Those dynamics are our rituals. They are the intercultural dynamics that exist yet many people pretend that they know nothing about other cultures because they don't recognise those structures as rituals. But I'm trying to explore the already existing rituals.

Q: So is your work also a kind of ritual?
A: Sure it's a ritual. I can tell you why I was interested in doing it. One way of learning about a particular area is to curate an event or exhibition. And another was to create the context for understanding work because one of the problems we've had in these debates about multiculturalism in the US. One person must usually stand for an entire culture. When you move away from fetishizing the individual and go to a group you can actually learn about the complexities within the culture.

Q: As you said, we often need to focus on individuals, but also in art, through artists, curators or critics. You've broken barriers professionally; has this created a problem for you in terms of personal recognition?
A: Well, yes and no. In some ways it's a problem because you run the risk of being accused of dilettantism. On the other hand, I think that women often are accused of dilettantism and men get away with it. Andre Breton also curated and wrote about art. So did Marcel Duchamp and Allan Kaprow, and they all made art but nobody thought there was anything wrong.
I always bring up these examples when people ask me this question because I don't understand why people think it's so unusual. Also, Damien Hirst, who's very popular right now, began as a curator. Also, there's an idea from the cultural debates from the 70s and 80s, from a lot of post-modern theory that the distinction between theory and practise was an artificial one, it was a product of a kind of formalist theory from the 1950s that made the artist a technician and the theorist the specialist who analysed the technique, and there were people from that period like Craig Owens and Mary Kelly and Barbara Kruger who were insisting on the need for artists to also theorise their practise. And the principle is, you begin with ideas and not a technique, and you use the medium that is most effective for dealing with your ideas. So for me the issues that I deal with in performance are those I think are best dealt with in performance.