Today from our partners at Art Practical, we bring you In the Dressing Room with Coco Fusco by Patricia Maloney and Moira Roth. In it, Coco Fusco takes us behind the scenes of her performance as Dr. Zira, the animal psychologist from Planet of the Apes, at Yerba Buena’s Radical Presence exhibition. As she removes her monkey costume backstage, Fusco opens up about performance and uniforms, economic violence, and humor. This article was originally published on October 13, 2015.

Coco Fusco. Observations of Predation in Humans: A Lecture by Dr. Zira, Animal Psychologist, 2013 (still); performance. Courtesy of Walker Art Center. Photo: Gene Pittman.

Even when you are naked in a performance, you are in costume. Everything counts about how you look, because you are the instrument, whether it’s your body or your voice. Of course I am masquerading, but I am not acting in a traditional sense. I am not thinking about masquerade; I am thinking about making a performance and what I have to do.

There was a Brazilian filmmaker, Wagner Morales, who made a documentary titled I Like Girls in Uniform (2006) about my work for the 2005 Videobrasil International Electronic Art Festival. He was looking at my performance Bare Life Study #1, in which the performers are all dressed in orange prison jumpsuits and I’m in fatigues. I’ve done a lot of pieces in which I am in uniform, such as for example a maquiladora worker’s uniform, because a lot of women go to work wearing uniforms. I’ve done many pieces about the kinds of work that women do.

This performance came about because I was using these films in an undergraduate class on Afrofuturism at Parsons School of Design in New York. I had students who had never heard of this stuff before. It’s not like I said, “Planet of the Apes!” and they were like, “Yeah!” They were really taken with the films, though, and that was a good sign.

Read the full article here.