RIGHTS OF PASSAGE
A Site-Specific Performance Installation
by Coco Fusco
to premiere at
The Johannesburg Biennale
on October 11, 1997
RIGHTS OF PASSAGE is about the actual terror that nonconsensual, incidental interracial enters still generate. It is about how South Africa's "past" is currently managed via romantic commodification. This packaging of Blackness, whether it be constructed as a precolonial African identity for tourists, a folkloric preservation of non-hybridized tradition, or a sanitized version of township life, is one of the many socio-cultural mechanisms of repression that characterize con temporary post-apartheid culture.
The RIGHTS OF PASSAGE passbooks serve as evidence of payment for entry to the
Biennale, an artist's "multiple", and a document of the performance. The "passbook" is a souvenir,
a reminder of a critical moment in history of demarcation of space in South Africa, of our ambiva
lent attraction to and repulsion from that past, and of its immanent commodification. One might
ask what it is involved in being able to "objectify" apartheid as a part of the past, and whether the
frequent bandying of the notion of "post-apartheid" does not at times serve to suppress aware
ness of the actual presence of segregation in contemporary multiracial contexts. In a broader,
more international sense, the piece is a comment on contemporary cultural tourism, and the new
status of "peripherally" situated biennials as marketplaces for all sort of exotica. Even the most
horrifying historical circumstances (apartheid) can function as a point of attraction, and ultimately,
a lure for global capital investment.
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