Unfiction on Safari

A collection of three films: Olaf Breuning's Home 2; Sascha Paladino's Throw Down Your Heart, with Bela Fleck; and Coco Fusco and Guillermo Gomez-Peña’s The Couple in the Cage, together, present a complex terrain of intention and action surrounding tourism, cultural interchange, appropriation, and hybridity. Unfiction is not going “on safari” — but using the idea of safari as a way to look at the site of intercultural one-way mirroring: where the viewer seems not to understand the exchange as being visible to both parties involved along the same human lines. In their own way, each film illuminates an aspect of this exchange, one that becomes increasingly important to examine as we hurtle towards ever-greater globalization. What is the safari of the 21st century and how do we know when we are are on it?