"Two Undiscovered Amerindians Visit the West"

Diana Taylor’s article discusses the performance, Two Undiscovered Amerindians Visit, by Cuco Fusco and Guillermo Gómez-Peña. In this traveling performance, the two artists confined themselves in a cage where viewers could observe and explore them. The artists chose specific places for their performances, countries that have histories of abuse towards natives (page 163). This performance “repeated the colonialist gesture of producing the ‘savage’ body, and it historicized the practice by highlighting its citational character (page 164.” What I found interesting in Taylor’s discussion of this performance was her exploration of the histories of confining the “other.” For example, the way in which museums present a discrepancy in power and how they come to represent “the theatricality of colonialism (page 167).”  When Taylor uses the word “theatricality” does she mean colonialism is a spectacle in this context? Taylor also claims that “the cage confronted the viewer with the unnatural and violent history of representation and exhibition of non-Western human beings (page 167).” The cage also brings into discussion the history of caging rebellious people in Latin America and pre-Hispanic times. The cage in this performance opens the artists up to being labeled and classified, while they remain silent, removing any individuality, similar to the effects of colonialism and even imprisonment (page 167). In what ways can we see the artists owning any sense of agency in this performance?