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.
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