CABELLO/CARCELLER. “A VOICE FOR ERAUSO. EPILOGUE FOR A TRANS TIME”
EXHIBITION
DATE
March 10th > September 25th
OPENING TIME
Tuesday to Sunday, from 11:00 am to 8:00 pm
JULY AND AUGUST TIME
From Monday to Sunday: 11:00 am - 8:00 pm
SPACE
Exhibition hall
TICKET
Free admission
CURATOR
Paul B. Preciado
EXHIBITION AUDIO GUIDE
Cabello/Carceller: "A voice for Erauso. Epilogue for a trans time"
The exhibition hall opens to the work of the artistic collective Cabello/Carceller (Helena Cabello and Ana Carceller) with the exhibition "A voice for Erauso. Epilogue for a trans time", a project that links the construction of historical narrative with contemporary queer and trans politics.
Through their interdisciplinary work, Cabello/Carceller use installation, performance, fictional accounts and video to question the hegemonic codes of representation in visual practices and propose critical alternatives.
In this case, the project started with the artists' encounter with a portrait that is as fascinating as it is unusual: the painting that (probably) Juan van der Hamen made of Catalina de Erauso dressed as an lieutenant of the Spanish colonial navy between 1625 and 1628 and which today belongs to the Kutxa collection. Erauso, who was born in Donostia in 1592 and was assigned female sex and given the name Catalina, is often better known as “the Lieutenant Nun”. This is partly due to her autobiography, in which she narrates the adventures of a young girl who escaped from a convent “dressed as a man” and later travelled as a soldier and merchant (under the names of Francisco de Loyola, Juan Arriola, Alonso Díaz Ramírez de Guzmán… and Antonio Erauso, among others) to the lands colonised by the Spanish empire from Chile to Mexico.
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As Paul B. Preciado, curator of the exhibition, notes “the portrait of Erauso as a man could be considered one of the first “trans” portraits in the history of Baroque art” although that notion is anachronistic since it did not exist until the XIX century. But, he adds, “Erauso is, like her portrait, a figure of shadows.” “Against the completely black background of the oil painting, a stern face emerges, but with an unsettlingly gentle gaze that cannot be described as masculine or feminine. However, their involvement in the genocide of the Mapuche and their position in the colonial market make them an awkward figure in trans history”. For this reason, the aesthetic of the exhibition is, like Erauso’s portrait, that of chiaroscuro.
For this artistic project, Cabello/Carceller have created a new “portrait” of Erauso, who is called into question by a gallery of new trans figures. This audiovisual piece, produced by Azkuna Zentroa, was filmed by Doxa Producciones and has Alberto sin Patrón as costume designer and Mursego on music.
The exhibition is thus constructed as an analogue-digital portrait gallery where Erauso (both the historical portraits of 1625 and the new portrait by Cabello/ Carceller) meet other representations of artist's previous work, including “Autorretrato como fuente”, (2001); “Archivo: Drag Modelos” (2007- underway); “Movimientos para una manifestación en solitario” (2021); or “Lost in Transition_un poema performativo” (2016).
The exhibition project is completed with a public programme of activities, the exhibition catalogue and an educational programme of workshop visits, geared towards at secondary schools.
Paul B. Preciado is a philosopher, art curator and writer. He is internationally known for his work on body, gender and sexuality politics. A former Fulbright scholar, he first studied philosophy and gender theory at The New School for Social Research in New York, where he studied with Jacques Derrida and Agnes Heller.
He has been Director of Public Programmes and the Independent Studies Programme at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Barcelona, Curator of Public Programmes at documenta 14, Kassel and Athens; and curator of the Taiwan Pavilion in Venice with the artist Shu Lea Cheang, among other institutional tasks. He teaches Philosophy of the Body at New York University, as well as other European universities. He is the author of “Countersexual Manifesto”; “Testo Junkie, Sex, Drugs and Biopolitics”; “Pornotopia”; “An Apartment on Uranus”; and “Can the Monster Speak?“, all published by Anagrama.
Cabello/Carceller, the artist team formed by Helena Cabello (París, 1963) and Ana Carceller (Madrid, 1964), started their collaboration in the early nineties with the intention of examining the hegemonic means of gender construction in visual practices, proposing critical alternatives from queer positions. They combine the undertaking of their artistic projects with research, writing, curating and teaching.
Their work was selected in 2015 for the Spanish Pavilion at the 56th Venice Biennale. It has also been exhibited in solo shows at MUAC (Mexico City, 2019), CA2M in Madrid in 2017, MARCO in Vigo and IVAM in Valencia in 2016, or in art centres in Denmark, Philadelphia, Madrid, and Buenos Aires, among others. Their projects have likewise been shown in group exhibitions at the Centre Pompidouin Paris (2017), MACBAin Barcelona (2020),Tranzit (Bratislava, 2018), Museo da Electricidade (Lisbon, 2015), MNCARS (Madrid, 2013), Casino Luxembourg or Brooklyn Museum in New York in 2007. They form part of the archive re.act feminism. A performing archive and are featured in publications such as Art and Queer Culture (Phaidon Press) or Jack Halberstam’s book The Queer Art of Failure (Duke University Press),
as well as on the prologue to the Spanish edition of Female Masculinity by the same author.
Every Thursday at 6:00 p.m. and 7:00 p.m. / Basque and Spanish
Free entry with prior registration in AZ Info, by calling 944 014 014 or writing to info@azkunazentroa.eus
Maximum of 25 people.
COLLABORATOR
