As a first statement regarding the works of Cabello/Carceller, the entry hall is conceived as a reading room, including documents, bibliographic references, and a subjective and militant timeline regarding gender theories and movements on a global scale.
This first step of the exhibition, reminiscent of all main retrospectives, must be understood as a declaration of intent. On the one hand, it underlines that the spectator needs to become an active reader, ready to “waste time” at the museum, and knowing that any and all readings are wrong readings, since they establish a significant difference with regards to the intent of the authors; a deviation that is fostered and increased by the other contents of the exhibition.
And, on the other hand, the timeline highlights events of the past with regards to the present, juxtaposes the “milestones” of a trajectory with the day-to-day conquests and disappointments of gender policies and its cultural expressions, a chrono-political view clashing with the evolutionary progress, with the unstoppable productive order of late capitalism, and strengthening the idea of the timeline as a spiral where the future affects the past in order to build the present.
From there on, the exhibition shows the works as a display device: A dramatized space based on repetition, sameness and double play, the core of its militant aesthetics, where works and times are juxtaposed to put the emphasis on the permanent current state of events of its critical apparatus.
The idea of transience can be found in the projection The End (después y antes) (“The End (After and Before)”), as well as in the Archivo Drag Models (“Drag Model File”), unfolding on the walls of the front-side rooms, both working as two practically reflected sides, as mirror spaces, highlighting the idea of doubles on which the artists have been working constantly. The corridor-rooms interconnecting them feature older works that are essential to understand the genealogy of their growth as artists, and the front-side rooms put into context everything related to their conception of drag policies.
At the perimeter corridor, opened as a way of transit between the front-side rooms and the back-side spaces, the video Libre producción de sentido (“Free Production of Sense”) shows the performance of Cabello/Carceller destroying at the Bucharest Biennale the photographs belonging to the Archivo Drag Models, warning us about eventual surprises and emphasizing the sense of construction/destruction/reconstruction of the works and of the spectator's own views.
The area of the gallery, where the series of photographs of empty pools Sin título (Utopía) (“Untitled (Utopia)”) is shown, expands towards the back room, refurbished as a bright space completing the exhibition with several works of particular relevance: At the front side, the Suite Rivolta installation, an aesthetic proposal for action with white-on-white graffiti, a reference to González-Torres and a video choreography; and, at the back side, the projection Off escena: si yo fuera… (“Off-scene: If I were…”), the project created with the interns of Matadero Madrid that puts the spotlight on jail as a place for memory. This projection is accompanied by an updated version of Come y calla (“Shut up and eat”), presented at the Círculo de Bellas Artes, Madrid, in 1993 and showing through small Polaroid photographs a portrait of the MARCO's cleaning staff, completely consisting of women, highlighting the idea of infiltration. These works operate as the closure/beginning of the exhibition, folding times and brilliantly intertwining the lines of history.
This epidemic of queer significance in the space of the MARCO goes beyond its conventional exhibition rooms and infiltrates its subsidiary spaces and its library. Like corrugated cardboard, where two thin cardboard sheets gain singular strength thanks to a third zig-zagging sheet inserted between them, the exhibition unfolds its narrative through its interstitial and structural voids, reading between the lines, and allowing the appearance of discursivities that are normally kept hidden. That's the space for joy and surprise, and hence its provisory and indefinite title: The exhibition as a space where any point of reference becomes a new centre from where the whole requires to be articulated anew, once and again, where queerness is not given for granted but happens as an indication of an utopian becoming.
Manuel Segade
