Tag Archives: feminism

Cabello/Carceller

 

Text on the exhibition by Pablo Martínez’s (Valladolid, 1979. Head of Programs at MACBA, Barcelona)

 

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We are pleased to present the third exhibition of Cabello/Carceller at Galeria Joan Prats, entitled I am A Stranger, and I am Moving, in which we show recent works: drawings, installation, video and photographs.

 

The exhibition appears as a chapter of an essay, whose central theme revolves around the video, Movimientos para una manifestación en solitario (Movements for a Solo Demonstration). Alike in structure, the exhibition also addresses various topics in its Notas al pie (footnotes), through drawings and photographs. The exhibition delves into fundamental issues such as the solitude experienced by those who choose to dissent from the lifestyle of the majority, the pressure felt to maintain a belligerent stance that defends freedom of choice and the need to produce entirely the limited vehemence that we often grant ourselves.

 

The title of the exhibition is a quote from David Wojnarowicz’s last conference before he died of AIDS in 1992. It refers to the stranglehold that accompanies the sick body, a despised body that society would prefer to expel. David Wojnarowicz is one of the artists that appears in the drawings and collages of Notas al pie, found in the first room, along with Tórtola Valencia, Pedro Lemebel, Agustina González López and Hélio Oiticica. Cabello/Carceller communicate through the past and present, speaking of those who have questioned the heteronomy of their bodies, who from their dissent, were able to transform disease, rejection and hatred into poetry.

 

This hatred saw Agustina González López shot in Granada, and later forgotten, during the same period as Federico García Lorca. She was defined by ‘social madness’ and suffered persecution and ridicule for her differences. Tórtola Valencia lived her sexuality as openly as time provided her, liberating her body and with it other bodies in search for new forms of physical expression. Pedro Lemebel dared to confront the Chilean dictatorship in the streets, but also the stale sectors of the Marxist left, wary of the revolutionary force of the transvestite, of her questioning of the patriarchal order and its obligatory gender conformity. Also, Hélio Oiticica, an anarcho-artist and a pioneer of relational practices that he chose to load with revolutionary content. He paired the aesthetics of the Russian avant-garde with dancing bodies in the favelas through a festival of colour and free expression, the ‘Parangolés’.

 

The video Movimientos para una manifestación en solitario features a body that becomes a manifestation in itself, a rebellious body that questions identity norms through movements, attitudes, and a way of being that vindicates itself politically. The body is alone but empowered in the awareness that its presence is itself a transformative presence, whose femininity gives it strength while being the cause of its social marginalization. The performer holds a banner that is present in the exhibition and quotes a fragment of a well-known phrase by Baruch Spinoza, ‘Lo que puede un cuerpo’, that opens the door to the philosophical sustenance of affect theory.

 

feminismos-cccb

19.07 – 01-12.2019

CCCB, Barcelona

 

¡FEMINISMOS! reúne las exposiciones «La Vanguardia Feminista de los años 70. Obras de la VERBUND COLLECTION, Viena» y «Coreografías del género» y un extenso programa de actividades para poner de manifiesto el diálogo, las continuidades y las rupturas entre el feminismo radical de los años setenta y los feminismos actuales.

 

Los años setenta marcaron un punto de inflexión en el movimiento feminista. Una nueva generación irrumpió en la vida pública para dar la vuelta al mundo y sacudir el orden simbólico establecido a través de múltiples prácticas y representaciones culturales. El arte que surgió entonces fue rompedor, tanto por el uso de los lenguajes y las formas como por su desafío de las construcciones de género, la reivindicación del derecho a decidir sobre el propio cuerpo y la denuncia de las violencias machistas, o el descubrimiento crucial de que lo personal también es político.

 

La explosión de libertad y creatividad del feminismo de los setenta ha sido una fuente de inspiración constante para los feminismos actuales, que han estallado en una riqueza y pluralidad sin precedentes, pero también para muchos otros movimientos de emancipación colectiva. En el contexto actual de auge del conservadurismo y de regresión de los derechos, el proyecto ¡FEMINISMOS! quiere reivindicar la aportación capital de las luchas por la igualdad y la diversidad de los feminismos que han cambiado definitivamente nuestra manera de entender el mundo.

 

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Vilafranca del Penedès, Barcelona, 1963

Lives and Works in Barcelona

 

 

Since 1990, Eulàlia Valldosera has developed a multidisciplinary work through ink works, photography, performance, installation and video.

 

She uses light, shadow, reflection and movement to create moments focused on the female archetype: the domestic environment, quotidian objects and specific places that create this intimacy, maternity, the body and the male gaze. In answer to the position of the work of art as part of the market economy, she employs her own body as starting point of her creations. Eulàlia Valldosera believes there is a taboo surrounding such corporeality, particularly in Europe.

 

The female body is used as a mean of identification, a beauty subject, on reproduction, contamination and decadence. It is however a flesh machine that must be cleaned and fed.

 

The focus can also shift from the body to the objects that surround it. Objects are transformed into `social mediators´ in her installations: they say something about the culture, the desire, the emotions and the daily life of the people who acquired them. The light brings with it a dark side, the hidden meaning of the objects on the surface. In Eulàlia Valldosera’s world, the shadows, as anti-objects, refer to a collective subconscious.