Cabello / Carceller

Un presente sin memoria: A/O (Caso Céspedes)
A Present Without Memory: A/O (Céspedes Case)

November 3—December 9, 2016
Alcove Gallery and Rufus Jones Study, Magill Library

Artists’ Talk & Opening
Un presente sin memoria: redescubriendo el Caso Céspedes
A Present Without Memory: rediscovering Céspedes Case
Thursday, November 3, 2016
4:30 p.m.
Philips Wing, Magill Library
*Talk will be in English

Inspired by the Inquisition case of an F to M surgeon, Eleno de Céspedes (Toledo, 1587), Cabello / Carceller’s mixed media project (photos and video) reflects on the traces of a life recorded in the inquisitorial dossier. “A/ O” was first shown in 2010, in Seville, Spain at the Centro Cultural de Arte Andaluz.

Cabello / Carceller are Madrid-based artists (Helena / Ana) who have exhibited widely. Their work has been featured in group shows, ranging from the Brooklyn Museum—Global Feminisms, 2007—to the Spanish Pavilion of the most recent iteration of the Venice Biennale (2015). Their current solo retrospective, “Draft for an Untitled Exhibition,” is at MARCO (Vigo, Spain) and will travel next to CA2M, in Madrid. Manuel Segade, CA2M curator, characterizes Cabello / Carceller’s practice as follows: Since 1992, Cabello/ Carceller (Paris, 1963/ Madrid, 1964) have developed a common artistic project focused on the criticism of hegemonic visual culture. As tools of feminist theory, and queer de-colonial theory, they have made use of visual and cultural studies in order to produce over the years a body of work which questions the neoliberal model of social production. Through interdisciplinary practices, they offer alternatives to conventional stories about minority politics, including the debate on the role of contemporary artistic production among them. A methodology based on mutual collaboration and on the incorporation of external actors and agents has allowed them to represent displacements and disarrangements, which reveal resistances and divergences against established values.

Artists’ Statement:

A/O (Caso Céspedes) se acerca desde una perspectiva contemporánea a la vida de un personaje histórico apenas conocido, Elena/o de Céspedes, granadina/o que vivió entre Andalucía y Castilla en el S. XVI y que, habiendo nacido mujer mulata y esclava, terminó viviendo como hombre, casándose por la iglesia con otra mujer y ejerciendo como cirujano. En el vídeo, Alex, un personaje actual cuyo género permanece indefinido a lo largo de la filmación, se encuentra desarrollando una investigación de campo para seleccionar los exteriores donde se rodará una película sobre Céspedes. Los espacios que recorre son los jardines del Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo en el que se filmó el vídeo. Por su atuendo y movimientos, Alex nos recuerda a Thomas, el fotógrafo protagonista de la película Blow Up, que pasea por un parque sin un aparente destino final; pero sus rasgos mediterráneos y su indefinición de género nos acercan a Céspedes. La película de Antonioni es a su vez una adaptación del relato Las babas del diablo de Cortázar. En ambas narraciones se plantea un análisis del espacio de la representación y del dispositivo fotográfico frente a la mirada, elementos que planean sobre este proyecto.
En A/O, Alex comienza observando lo que le rodea, buscando adecuar lo que encuentra al relato que pretende situar; pero a lo largo del vídeo su mirada se vuelve cada vez más introspectiva, pues nuestra/o personaje va encontrando múltiples similitudes entre Céspedes y su propia identidad mestiza. De este modo, confluyen dos relatos que nos permiten acercar una historia aparentemente lejana en el tiempo a realidades aún vigentes en nuestros días. El proyecto propone lecturas de análisis sobre cuestiones de género; pero también ofrece posibilidades de reflexión sobre el importante papel que jugaron la esclavitud o la raza en la construcción identitaria española durante la etapa colonial y su ausencia en el ámbito de la representación, planteando claves para la exploración de los modos de construcción de los imaginarios. Inicialmente A/O incluía una publicación –que finalmente no vio la luz–, que serviría como herramienta para trasladar el debate al ámbito educativo, tanto en educación secundaria como en universidad. Para ello se produjeron tres textos que acompañan al proyecto y que analizaban la situación de los esclavos en Andalucía en las fechas en las que vivió Céspedes (Aurelia Martín Casares), la bibliografía escrita sobre el personaje (M. José Belbel) y la presencia de esclavos y disidencias sexuales en la representación pictórica española (Sergio Rubira).

Artists’ Statement [English Version]:

A/O (Céspedes Case) approaches from a contemporary perspective the life of Elena/o de Céspedes, who was born in Granada and spent his/her life between Andalusia and Castile during the 16th Century, and who, being born a slave and mixed race woman, ended up living as a man and working as a surgeon, a job that was reserved for men at the time. In the film, Alex, our un-gendered contemporary character, is traversing the gardens of the CAAC Centre for Contemporary Art, trying to find the right locations for a film about Céspedes’s life. Alex somehow recalls Thomas, the photographer in the film Blow Up, dressed in similar shirt and trousers and continuously walking around with apparently no clear objective or destination; but at the same time, his/her Mediterranean and sexually undefined complexion are reminiscent of Céspedes. Antonioni’s film is also an adaptation of Cortázar’s tale Las babas del diablo (The Devil’s Drool, translated to English in 1967 as Blow-up), and both narratives confront the space of representation and the photographic device with the gaze, all of them elements that hang over this project.

In A/O (meaning the feminine and masculine endings in Spanish gendered words), Alex starts observing everything around, looking for the best places to fit a story that seems to have been imposed, like any other. But along the film, our character’s gaze turns more and more introspective, especially when the similarities with Céspedes’s mestizo identity become increasingly evident for him/her. In this way, two narratives merge in the video, bringing an apparently distant history in time to our present realities. The project suggests different readings about gender questions in contemporary societies; it also opens a space for reflection about the role that slavery and race have played in the construction of the Spanish identity during its colonial period, pointing at their absence from the space of representation, and offering some clues to explore the modes of construction of our imaginaries. Initially A/O was designed to include a publication, which finally could not see the light of day, and that would serve as a tool to be used in an educational context (secondary school and university). Three essays to accompany the project were produced for this purpose: a text by Aurelia Martín Casares analyzes the situation of slaves in Andalusia during the time when Céspedes lived, another text by M. José Belbel about the bibliography on Céspedes, and finally a survey on the presence of slaves and sexual dissidences in the Spanish pictorial representation by art historian Sergio Rubira.

Cabello / Carceller’s visit and exhibition are organized by Israel Burshatin, Levin Professor of Comparative Literature and Spanish, and sponsored by Haverford College Libraries, the Distinguished Visitors Program, the Department of Spanish, the Bi-College Program in Comparative Literature, the John B. Hurford ’60 Center for the Arts and Humanities’ Tuttle Creative Residencies Program, and Los Tempranillos: Early Modern Spain and Colonial Latin America Seminar of Greater Philadelphia (Mellon Tri-Co).