Coco Fusco and Guillermo Gámez-Peça's Two Unknown Amerindians is a bold performance experiment whose successes and failures stem from the same aspect of the show: its tendency to blurring the lines between the audience and the artists. When Two Undiscovered Amerindians succeeds, its presentation of an ethnographic exhibit causes audiences to question their complicity in the history of colonialism, whether they take the exhibit at face value or not. When the performance fails, it deceives the audience so completely that they may ignore its anti-colonial message and replace it with their own contradictory or unrelated interpretation. Both reactions are made possible by Fusco and G?mez-Pe?a's decision to almost completely collapse the fourth wall and invite spectators to interact with the installation. This action, in Diana Taylor's terminology, collapses the "narrative" of an artistic performance into the "scenario" of a true ethnographic show. The suspension of disbelief caused by this breakdown allows audience members to decide for themselves what the performance means, for better or worse. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay As seen in the documentary The Couple in the Cage: A Guatinaui Odyssey and Fusco's clarifying article "The Other History of Intercultural Performance," the performance produced four categorically distinct reactions. The first, what Fusco and his collaborators intended and expected to see, was an understanding of the satirical, but above all anticolonial, nature of the fake human zoo. The second reaction, the one that makes up the bulk of the documentary footage, was expressed by audience members who did not see the show as fiction but still felt uncomfortable with the prospect of caging people. Both of these reactions are called “successes” because they achieved Fusco and G?mez-Pe?a's goal of educating the museum-going masses about the Western world's cruel history of indigenous exploitation by pseudo-scientists and entrepreneurs. The moments when the performance “failed” were indicated by the audience's inability to grasp the artists' critical message. This happened in two ways, the first of which is what happened in Buenos Aires, when the public allowed itself to be completely deceived by the illusion of the show, without hesitation in caging the “savages”. The last possible reaction was the “moralistic” response, in which critics were more concerned with the ethics of deceiving such masses into believing a false ethnographic show, than with the show's actual argument against our immoral history with the natives submissive. The first two types of reactions are qualified as successes because they follow the artists' intended goal of communicating an anti-exotic and anti-colonial feeling to their audience. Fusco clarifies that his “original intent was to create a satirical commentary on Western concepts of the exotic and primitive Other” by creating “a surprise or 'uncanny' encounter, in which the audience had to undergo their own process of reflection on what was seeing” (Fusco, 37, 40). He defines the concept of a successful performance as one that conveys the satirical anticolonial message and, perhaps more importantly, allows audience members to seriously consider their own relationships with colonialism. After all, when faced with the “tamed savage, many members of the public felt entitled to assume the role of the colonizer, only to find themselves uncomfortable with the implications of the game” (Fusco, 47). NotIt mattered that some members of the audience could not see beyond the illusion, it only mattered that they reflected on why the exploitative spectacle of ethnographic displays is inconceivable. In this sense, an effective performance of Two Undiscovered Amerindians affected the audience in the same way as Patricia Hoffbauer and George Emilio Sanchez's The Architecture of. Seeing did. When a socially conscious audience sees either performance, they see themselves implicated in the forces of history that produced the dehumanizing stereotypes on display. May Joseph, a critic of both performances, deduces that the “amusement park of minority archetypes” presented by Architecture and Two Undiscovered Amerindians should “suggest a fundamental realignment of audience expectations. . . they must be done" (Joseph, 125). Fundamentally, this realignment sought by artists is made possible by “confusing the role of spectator and interpreter” (Joseph, 117). Audience members have the power to change their prejudices only when they can see their own role in the realization of stereotypes. Only by breaking the traditional barriers between themselves and their viewers can Fusco, G?mez-Pe?a, 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 promote audience reflection to such an extent that the audience fails to see the ironic message of the performance. In the case of Two Undiscovered Amerindians, the specific reasons for this misinterpretation can be found in Diana Taylor's vision of the performance as one of a long series of colonial “discovery scenarios.” Although the satirical intent of Two Undiscovered Amerindians is clear to most critics, many viewers have lost it. Therefore, it helps to interpret the show on a surface level, to decipher why its themes have so often been misunderstood. Taylor examines what makes an ethnographic show so appealing to colonial audiences and, consequently, what makes Two Undiscovered Amerindians susceptible to being interpreted literally as a true ethnographic show. Taylor first defines a basic paradigm of ethnography as the “discovery scenario,” a kind of nonnarrative performance that “normalizes the extraordinary conceit” of “Otherness to be discovered” (Taylor, 54). He uses Columbus's descriptions of his early encounters with the indigenous people of the Caribbean as an archetypal example of these “discovery scenarios.” In the Columbus scenario, we see two crucial elements of Fusco and G?mez-Pe?a's performance: the "mimesis" of Western culture by the "natives" and the audience's assumption of "reciprocity" in communication by part of the non-speaking Others (Taylor, 60). These elements are captured in the archive of audience reactions, Paula Heredia's documentary The Couple in the Cage: A Guatinaui Odyssey. In the film, the Two Undiscovered Amerindians audience becomes the actor, and his performance of faith in the scenario shows how the original performance failed to get its point across. Taylor's idea of ​​mimesis is expressed by interviewed audience members who marveled at the way Amerindian characters could dress in modern clothing and perform Western behaviors, such as watching TV and listening to popular music (Heredia). They assumed that these "savages" were inclined to mimicry in the same way as the Columbus audience. They dehumanized Fusco and Gámez-Peça's characters by assuming that their appropriation of Western fashion and behavior was an act of parrot-like imitation rather than an expression of freewill. The assumption of mutual communication was seen in the reactions of audience members who believed they could interpret G?mez-Pe?a's gibberish or the non-verbal communication of one of the performers. Some interviewees said they could understand the arc of G?mez-Pe?a's nonsensical Spanish "ancestral history" without actually understanding what his words meant, while others tried to interpret the emotional or sexual relationships between the two non-speaking characters. and themselves (Heredia). Both of these assumptions show that some members of the public were completely involved in the colonial scenario. Using the same two tactics highlighted in Taylor's analysis of the 1492 narrative, audiences performed Fusco and G?mez-Pe?a's colonial fantasy come true. In a way, this total immersion fulfilled Fusco's intention to create "a blank screen onto which the audience projected their fantasies," but the piece's primary purpose, to inspire self-reflection on shared history, was defeated by the inability of the public 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 since such theatrical performances are almost identical in both the sincerely colonial and the satirical anti-colonial settings, it is easy to see how an audience uninformed, without knowledge of the show's fiction, he might confuse the two (Taylor, 71). The performance's tendency to confuse fiction and reality, a tendency that had previously allowed audience members to reconsider their opinions about “savage” stereotypes, supported the audience's cultural biases. The resulting “normalization” of colonial theatricality is a dangerous misunderstanding that could only result from an audience so immersed in the tantalizing interactivity, if not outright credibility, of a show that they fail to see the show's satire. For the same reason the show surpassed satire, some viewers of Two Undiscovered Amerindians responded without skepticism or conviction, but with moral indignation. Just as she was surprised to see some observers believe the fiction she created, Fusco was astonished to discover that “a considerable number of intellectuals, artists, and cultural bureaucrats sought to divert attention from the substance [of the show] to the 'morals.' implications' of . . . 'misinform the public'" (Fusco, 37). These social elites had the education to see the satirical bent of Two Undiscovered Amerindians, but they chose to overlook the message of the show in order to criticize its form. Just like the masses who believed during Guatinauis's existence, elites were literally responding to the performance's methods, which they considered “offensive to the public, harmful to children, and dishonestly subverting the educational responsibilities of their museums” (Fusco, 51), the performance failed to make its point because, as audience reactions reveal, its anticolonial structure has been overshadowed by the unstructured dialogue between audience and performer. The open and “unfocused” performativity of Two Undiscovered Amerindians is a double-edged sword : it alternately facilitates and hinders the message of the performance. On the one hand, the intrusion of the artists into the audience prevented static observation of the performance, instead it catalyzed opinions on the ethics of ethnographic demonstrations. On the other hand, the fusion of audience and performance often overshadowed the imaginary nature of the act. When the audience did not consider themselves theatrical spectators, the theatricality of the show failed to provoke.