Coco Fusco's 'Bare Life Study' and 'Operation Atropos' at MC, Los Angeles

Coco Fusco's 2006 exhibition at MC in Los Angeles featured the photographic series Bare Life Study #1, a fictional interrogation manual, real military manuals, and the 59-minute video Operation Atropos. The show examined the weaponization of female sexuality by the US military, referencing the Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay scandals. Bare Life Study #1 documents a 2005 performance outside the US Consulate in São Paulo, where shackled youths in orange uniforms scrub the street with toothbrushes while Fusco, in fatigues, commands them. The title invokes philosopher Giorgio Agamben's concept of 'bare life'—a state without citizenship rights. Without context, the images risk being read as mere dominance-submission roleplay. The limited-edition manual, Human Resource Exploitation Manual For Female Interrogators, parodies declassified CIA documents and US military policies using female sexuality as an interrogation tool. Fusco and six women enrolled in Team Delta's POW Interrogation Resistance and Interrogator Training Program; the resulting video follows them in reality-TV style as they undergo detention and interrogation. The work questions the distance between representation and reality, though it does not address the tradition of sexual manipulation as women's path to power or the psychological toll on soldiers and prisoners.