The Siren

The Siren is a project by Coco Fusco, launched in New York in 2025 together with Noah Fischer and Pablo Helguera as an artistic response to the political drift of the United States. Satire, drawing, writing and print are the tools it uses to intervene in the present. It is an anti-establishment satirical newspaper in broadsheet format (42 × 57.5 cm), distributed free of charge in New York. Caviera will show every issue of The Siren published to date, the first time they have been exhibited in Italy, and visitors will be able to browse them. Presenting The Siren now, a few weeks before the midterm elections on November 3, has a specific meaning. The midterm vote will renew the House of Representatives and part of the Senate. It will be American voters’ first real verdict on the new political season. For many, it carries the hope of change and the chance to halt a drift that seems unstoppable. The Siren was born out of this tension and will closely witness it. It will record what happens with its own tools: drawing, satire, paradox. Following The Siren through the weeks leading up to the vote means taking a close look at a democratic crisis that does not concern a single country. It also means doing so through the languages artists and writers choose in order to resist. Rather than reporting the news, they invent forms that escape the rhetoric of power. Pablo Helguera explicitly links The Siren to the tradition of the activist press, including the Bologna movement of ’77, from A/traverso to Radio Alice. In 2027 it will be fifty years since that season, and Caviera will dedicate a project to it. The Siren is the thread that will lead us there. We are not interested in building a genealogy after the fact or in offering a nostalgic celebration. What interests us is what the Movement of ’77 put at stake and what The Siren brings back into circulation: communication as a practice of cultural conflict, the printed page as a laboratory, irony as a form of critique. “Una risata vi seppellirà” (“A laugh will bury you”), people said back then. The Siren is making the same wager today. Caviera does not receive The Siren as a finished editorial object. It treats it as a device in motion, to be activated and reactivated. October 10 is not only the opening of an exhibition. It opens a space that will stay open in the months that follow and will change with what happens inside and outside it. It is a place for relationships more than for display, where The Siren keeps happening.