OPERATION ATROPOS

OPERATION ATROPOS is a documentary about interrogation and POW resistance training. Director Coco Fusco worked with retired US Army interrogators who subjected her group of women student to immersive simulations of POW experiences in order to show them what hostile interrogations can be like and how members of the US military are taught to resist them. The group of interrogators is called Team Delta, and they regularly offer intensive courses that they call "Authentic Military Experiences" to civilians. The documentary includes interviews with the interrogators that shed light on how they read personalities, evaluate an interrogatee's reliability, and use the imposition of physical and mental stress strategically. More fundamentally, however, the film shows how interrogators rationalize what they do and how they imagine both themselves and their enemies.

Operarion Atropos will open at Elastic Space on 13 June 6-9 pm. The exhibition runs from 17 June to 30 July open 1-6 Saturday and Sunday and by appointment; 22 Parfett St. London, E1 1JR.

Coco Fusco, born and based in New York is a interdisciplinary artist and writer and is one of the most significant and influential performance and video-artists (also an articulate and outspoken theoretician, as well as an active curator). She deals with issues such as globalisation, gender-specific conflicts, cultural colonisation and intercultural theory and practice. Her work is an ongoing reflection on the conditions of (women's) bodies in globalising and technologically imbued environments.

She has performed, lectured, exhibited and curated around the world since 1988. She is the author of English is Broken Here (The New Press,1995), The Bodies That Were Not Ours and Other Writings (Routledge/inIVA, 2001) and the editor of Corpus Delecti: Performance Art of the Americas (Routledge, 1999) and Only Skin Deep: Changing Visions of the American Self (Abrams, 2003).

Fusco's recent art projects combine electronic media and performance in a variety of formats, from staged multi-media performances incorporating large scale projections and closed circuit television to live performances streamed to the internet that invite audiences to chart the course of action through chat interaction. Her works have been included in such events as The Whitney Biennial, Sydney Biennale, The Johannesburg Biennial, The Kwangju Biennale, The Shanghai Biennale and VideoBrasil.

ELASTIC RESIDENCE is a non-profit gallery space for projects and durational performance. It is an artist-run space established in 2004, aimed at giving artists dealing with challenging contemporary material, direct access to exhibiting opportunities.

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