FONS ÀUDIO #60
Helena Vinent
In FONS ÀUDIO #60, artist Helena Vinent takes us deep into her work “Hard Persistence”, which was originally created for the Museu de la Música de Barcelona in 2020, and is now part of the MACBA Collection. Helena’s artistic practice resonates with a crip-queer and/or anti-ableist perspective: in short, a politics of life that advocates for those marginalised by a system that standardises and validates the body for the benefit of capitalism.
In this three-channel video installation, Helena Vinent explores her fragmented sensory relationship with music, dance, and orality from the political perspective of a deaf person. As a (forced) user of hearing aids, Helena combines autobiography and autofiction to challenge the idea of a complete, fixed body. She persists in opening up spaces for a singular language, constantly moving away from the status quo, questioning the hegemony of verbality, and embracing strangeness and agency in spite of everything. In “Hard Persistence”, subtitles, closed captions, displacements, hapticity and the cyborg body—via prostheses—come together in a fragmentary narrative that questions the essentialist idea of a fixed identity. The starting point is the premise that, in an ableist context such as ours, a body assigned as disabled is not read as a complete human body.
This podcast includes a literal transcription, including closed captions as a request of the artist, both as a way to make the conversation accessible for herself and for the Deaf community
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