Lead Artist: Coco Fusco

Interdisciplinary artist and writer Coco Fusco is the lead artist for the first AFMAC workshop hosted in Lagos, Nigeria. Fusco's work explores themes of gender, identity, race, and power and has been exhibited and published internationally. Below is an introduction to her recent work, The Eternal Night / La noche eterna (2022).

The Eternal Night is the story of three Cuban young men that were condemned for their beliefs and their creations. It is about the power of the imagination to transcend circumstance.

The film is based on the true story of Cuban writer and former political prisoner Néstor Díaz de Villegas. In 1976, Díaz de Villegas was sentenced to six years in prison for writing a poem. He was seventeen years old. Prior to his imprisonment he had already been subjected to censure several times for his nonconformist attitudes, which were deemed by the revolutionary government considered to be “ideologically divergent.”

The story focuses a poet who has recently arrived at the prison, a young Evangelical man from the countryside and an older actor who was accused of trying to assassinate Fidel Castro. The actor ushers them into the social world of the prisoners, showing them how to resist the authorities’ attempt to re-educate them. To enliven the prisoners’ evenings, he convinces the warden that screening films would be a more effective means of teaching inmates about the benefits of socialism and creates a cinema inside the prison.