FONS ÀUDIO #52
Cabello/Carceller
Cabello/Carceller is the artist duo Helena Cabello (b. Paris, 1963) and Ana Carceller (b. Madrid, 1964). In their work since the early nineties, they switch between and combine performance, installation, essay, drawing, video, dance, photography and poetry to construct narratives that question identity and gender roles and offer us new ways of inhabiting, feeling, and representing the world.
In FONS AUDIO #52 Cabello/Carceller talk about their two works in the MACBA Collection: ‘I Don’t Care about Your Gaze Anymore’ (February 1994) and ‘A/O (The Céspedes Case)’ (July 2009-July 2010). Through them, they reflect on blurred identities, on the diverse possibilities of genders and on the need to create new representations that disrupt the traditional patterns structuring our gaze. They also invite us to reclaim subjectivities that history has systematically erased from its pages. In this case, through the story of Elena/o de Céspedes, the first woman surgeon—mulatta, to boot—in the history of Christianity, who was born in Granada in the 16th century and lived much of her adult life as a man. The study of the Céspedes case, like other revisions of historical identities that Cabello/Carceller have carried out in their work, does not arise from a nostalgic-mythological impulse. It springs from a desire to trace new genealogies that interconnect and open up a dialogue between those forgotten pasts and our current stories.
Lucía C. Pino
Artist Lucía C. Pino approaches her sculptural work as a conversation with the materials, the media and the surroundings—in relation to where they come from as well as the place they will occupy—, emphasising their performative aspect and their interdependence with her every move. It is a practice that is not easily defined, permeated by a wide range of interests, influences and concerns, among which Lucía includes the rituals of reading, writing, and doing-with-others. In FONS ÀUDIO #58, Lucía C. Pino presents Non-Slave Tenderness, 2018.
Cabello/Carceller
Cabello/Carceller is the artist duo Helena Cabello and Ana Carceller. Since the early nineties, they have been questioning the arbitrariness and restrictions imposed by gender divisions on our bodies, spaces, representations and behaviour. In this podcast Cabello/Carceller infiltrate the arts institution and show how queer voices are systematically excluded from spaces of power, as well as museums and collections. Through their work, they invite us to reconsider the spaces we live in and leave, in order to queer them and turn them into transitional, unproductive places – sometimes melancholy, sometimes liberating – from which to imagine and activate new kinds of existence. Together, we activate the political potentiality of bodies, affects, festivity and collectivity. But we also acknowledge the solitary revolt of discordant bodies who, by their mere presence, are already doing politics
Carlos Motta
Carlos Motta sees his research as a potential space of enunciation from which to act as a counterweight to the prevailing narratives—a positive gesture of recognition of social groups, identities and communities whose voices have been suppressed by the dominant colonial power. His radical multidisciplinary practice and his use of a range of media—from video to installation, sculpture, performance and drawing on paper—make him hard to pin down. He also focuses on interaction with others, in ensemble works involving orality, documentary, curating, and even organizing public programs and symposia. In this podcast, we talk to Carlos Motta about art, politics, the market, and working conditions.
Grant Watson
We sat down with curator and researcher Grant Watson to talk about textiles and their material and social ramifications. Instead, we ended up talking about his interview-based practice, essentially producing an extremely meta interview on interviews and interviewing. In this podcast, Grant talks about enacting, editing, demographics, transference, capturing the atmosphere of an interview, and other issues that he explores in one of his main ongoing projects, How We Behave.
El Palomar
In FONS AUDIO #53 El Palomar tell us about their work in the MACBA collection Not Only Homophiles Are Homosexual, but Also Those Blinded by the Lost Phallus, a project in which they take up an unfinished, unproduced script by essayist and anthropologist Alberto Cardín and decide to make the film by their own means. In the course of rereading (and rewriting) Cardín’s cinematic vision, and through a process of immersion and meticulous research into its immediate context and background, El Palomar reconstruct a chapter in our history of sexual dissent, which is today still full of gaps and absences. Chief among them, Alberto Cardín.
Maria F. Dolores/AMOQA
AMOQA (Athens Museum of Queer Arts) is a hybrid, self-organized platform for the research and promotion of arts and studies on sexuality and gender, operating in Greece since 2016.
Fefa Vila
Fefa Vila Nuñez is a queer feminist ‘artivist’, sociologist, mother, essayist, teacher, and many other things. Fefa was one of the founders of the lesbian collective LSD (1993-1998), which was, together with La Radical Gai, one of the touchstones of queer artivism in Spain in the 1990s. Through their political-artistic actions, LSD and La Radi defended new ways of understanding the body, sex, life, death, desire, friendship, family and work relationships, and political action. In this podcast, Fefa Vila reflects aloud on queerness as a state of radical estrangement, which is constantly being redefined. She also talks about the need to experience other forms of sociability, about other affective-relational models and about motherhood.