A tale rescued from the ashes

Antoni Hervàs described his ambitious exhibition El misterio de Caviria (The mystery of Caviria), at La Capella, Barcelona, 2016, as ‘an investigation into the transformative power of drawing, capable of activating itself, destroying itself, altering itself and breathing life into what surrounds it. A visual spectacle where the mythology of Barcelona cabaret and classical Greek mythology meet. An invocation to the gods of the underground following the tradition of the ancient Greek Cabiri cult, in which fire, blood and the mocking of masculinity are the essential elements for the redemption of guilt and crime’, so Hervàs.

Starting from drawing, the artist expands into three-dimensional papier-mâché scenes and cardboard transformations. These link up with the subversive power and irreverent sub-culture of the varieté shows performed around the turn of the century in Barcelona theatres and popular venues around the Avenida de el Paralelo and in the so-called Barrio Chino, that part of the city behind the Ramblas.

‘In the Plaça Raquel Meller, which takes its name from the famous Couplet singer who made her debut at one of the oldest popular theatres in Barcelona, the Theatre Arnau, it is said that colourful people converged from five theatres and clubs: the Arnau, the Bagdad, the Barcelona by night, the Bartz and the Apolo wine cellars’. In the early decades of the 20th century the Paralelo Avenue was the cradle of new political movements: republicanism, socialism and anarchism. It also became a new leisure centre for the working class that was frequented by the Catalan bourgeoisie, too. Thus, a profound change in the social perception of sexuality manifested itself, one that challenged traditional morals.

The artist describes:

‘From the influence exercised by Leopoldo Frégoli, who settled in the city at the end of the 19th century to premiere the first drag shows, to the stars who succeeded him, they all stirred up an ardent public, night after night. These ambiguous figures shone fleetingly in these spaces of resistance until they faded away with the outbreak of the Civil War. Subsequently, these popular myths of passion and unbridled love were retold and given new meaning. This meant it was possible for the artists to return to the Couplet and so express the forbidden, which the censors of the authoritarian dictatorship sought to suppress.

Madam Arthur stood out among the numerous luminaries of the local travesty scene. At the Barcelona de Noche club she astonished Federico Fellini, who later paid tribute to her in his 1957 film Nights of Cabiria. She performed a show in which she laid bare her artifice, transforming from femme fatale by tearing away her eyelashes and feather boas and showing her naked face, revealing “her secret”. She staged this with overblown sets decorated with tropical motifs. Reminiscent of exotic locations, they were built with improvised materials, yet glittered in the spotlight like sequins.

The Theatre Arnau became the most famous venue for these fantastical settings. After the curtains fell in 2004 and the building decayed, it continued in the collective memory as a stage for and witness to the love affairs, celebrations, rows and mundane stories of all those who, in the constant flow of life, turn into protagonists of the drama and intensity of those passionate songs, songs that have made the theatre come alive.’

With his work Under the firelight, the ash shines like glitter Hervàs takes the charismatic fan-shaped pediment of the Theatre Arnau as a starting point for something the artist expresses as follows: ‘The creation of a mutant sculpture made of materials that reject nobility and celebrate recognisable scars and contrasts. The forms of the fan, star, skirt, leg merge. The installation determines the room with the loud arrival and bearing of a star. Come and see, we don’t know what might happen, it’s cabaret.’

*This work revisits his previous project Apuntes para un incendio de los ojos (Notes for a fire of the eyes), a paper-mâché structure in the form of a portal referring to the Theatre Arnau for the exhibition Panorama 21 at the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, now taking on new shape and meaning.

Antoni Hervàs (*1981, Barcelona, ES) studied fine arts at the Universitat de Barcelona (ES) and engraving and printing at the Llotja Escola d’Art i Disseny, Barcelona (ES). His work has been presented in solo exhibitions in following venues: The Green Parrot, Barcelona (ES), The RYDER Projects, Madrid (ES), OKELA, Bilbao (ES), 1646, The Hague (NL), La Capella, Barcelona (ES). He has participated in several group exhibitions at CCCB, Barcelona (ES), MACBA, Barcelona (ES), Centro Botín, Santander (ES), La Casa Encendida, Madrid (ES). He has also curated shows like La pintura del futur at MAC Mataró Art Contemporani, Mataró (ES), periodic exhibitions like GIMMICK I & II at the Sant Andreu Contemporani, Barcelona (ES), and performative events like Mercuri Splash, together with David Bestué, for the Fundació Miró, Barcelona (ES). Hervàs has been a resident at Gasworks, London (UK), and the 18th Street Arts Center, Los Angeles (US), and won the 2016 Premi Ciutat de Barcelona d’Arts Visuals.

Delving into the subject of representation through the medium of an audiovisual mixtape, the work is structured under 8 themes:

íntró (éstádó cónstánté dé críngé)
síndrómé dél ímpóstór / nó mérécé lá péná / párá nó dár péná
ántifáz káwáíí / nárrátívá
ámóré (ábró híló – té ódíó) / chínító dé ámól
pérdón pór éxístír
mámá hé mátádó á ún sím
pólly dé hácéndádó / lá gállíná cápónátá
dé dóndé víénés / ní dé áqúí ní dé állá / óútró

Autofiction: a musical tale for a bazaar in the year 3000

Chenta Tsai is Putochinomaricón, a well-known musician, producer and multimedia artist who uses pop as a tool for resistance and political questioning. Her proposal is articulated around her life experience as a person of colour from the Taiwanese diaspora, a sexual and gender dissident, who has grown up in Spain. A distilled experience, deconstructed from queer theory, and fictionalised in her alter ego in a state of constant evolution and revolution.

The mere fact that she uses her voice and lyrics to invade a genre that usually rejects the critical and irreverent, such as pop, is already a statement of her creative approach where everything contaminates everything and forms a whole: ideology, image and sound. Putochinomaricón fills the stages of the main international festivals with a particular programme that brings together costumbrismo (in its original sense of a literary or pictorial interpretation of local everyday life) – elevated to the category of the hyper-relevant, formed by decontextualised objects, almost fetishes – protest song, globalised club culture. Internet culture, intelligent provocation and ugliness or kitsch have been an intrinsic part of her work since her first LP Corazón De Cerdo Con Ginseng Al Vapor (Steamed Pork Heart with Ginseng) in 2018, Miseria Humana (Human Misery) in 2019 or JÁJÁ ÉQÚÍSDÉ (Dystopía Aburrida) in 2022.

Racism, homophobia, misogyny, clichés, prejudices: her denunciations never seek to victimise, whether herself or others, but represent rather self-empowerment. Putochinomaricón turns the insult into a defence of difference through humour and poetry. The artist, who is also a writer (as well as architect and violinist), has authored the essay Arroz Tres Delicias – Sexo, Raza y Género (2019) and written a column for the Spanish newspaper El País. She investigates the capacity that language has, the terms with which we name ourselves and are named to control our identities. In this, she emphasises the need to coin new terms or contribute to their use, in order to determine and liberate their interpretation oneself.

Through the presence and performance of her physical and digital body, her artistic practice takes as its theme a self that questions labels, proposing new spaces for activism, for the expression of multiple identities, for the hedonism of the non-hegemonic and for friendship and care. The audiovisual piece áfóñg, in the words of the artist, ‘explores this tension, the double-edged complexities of representation and visibility experienced by the artist as a dissident. It questions the possibility of building platforms for East and Southeast Asian gender and sexual dissidents, spaces that fully embrace us without having to fragment, simplify or hide parts of our identities to fit into hegemonic spaces. Utopian futures where our bodies are far from tokenisation, instrumentalisation and fetishisation, building speculative spaces of communal healing through pop as a tool of resistance and political critique.’ […] ‘Who are we, as non-hegemonic artists, Occupying a space because of our art/ Occupying a space for aesthetics without ethics?/Occupying a space as a token?/Occupying a space to meet a diversity quota?/Occupying a space out of white guilt?/Occupying a space to enable an event to whitewash fascism?/ Occupying a space to enable a brand to pinkwash?/Occupying a space to repair that space’s long history of institutional and structural racism?’

Chenta Tsai aka Putochinomaricón (*1990, Taipei, TW), is an artist, architect, activist, musician, producer, and live performer based in Madrid (ES). Pop as a tool of political resistance is central in her newest work she produced for the Frankfurter Kunstverein as well in her first LP Corazón De Cerdo Con Ginseng Al Vapor in 2018, Miseria Humana in 2019 or JÁJÁ ÉQÚÍSDÉ (Distopía Aburrida) in 2022. Chenta Tsai is also the author of Arroz Tres Delicias – Sexo, Raza y Género and former columnist of the Spanish newspaper El País. She has collaborated with artists such as Pussy Riot, Dorian Electra, GFOTY and Tami and has performed physically and virtually in festivals and clubs such as Primavera Sound, Barcelona (ES), Sónar, Barcelona (ES), Heav3n, Los Angeles (US) or Final, Taipei (TW). She has participated in the Spanish Pavilion of the 58. Biennale di Venezia (IT) and has exhibited in the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid (ES).

Schreber is a Woman, 2020
4K video transferred to HD
2-Channel synchronised projection
Colour, stereo, 30 min
Installation, variable dimensions
Courtesy the artists

Rewritten memories of a sick society

El Palomar is an expanded art project, directed by Mariokissme and R. Marcos Mota, initiated in January 2013, with a focus on the research and production of contemporary queer art projects and works linked to the politics of sexual and gender dissidence. The project, so the artists, ‘is embedded in countless discourses, subjects and practices that have difficulty penetrating the official contemporary cultural sphere. Since 2013 we have been working on generating encounters and exchanges; creating a programme based on multivocal research and polyphonic incorporation from work on the margins (from the underground).’

The video installation Schreber is a Woman is the second episode of a trilogy in the making that began with the piece No es homosexual simplemente el homófilo sino el cegado por el falo perdido (Not only homophiles are homosexual, but also those dazzled by the lost phallus), 2016, that El Palomar made based on the unfinished script with the same title by the anthropologist Alberto Cardín (1948–1992). The artists have completed unfinished parts of the script, directed the film and acted in it.

Alberto Cardín was an intellectual figure linked to the city of Barcelona, a critical and controversial personality, a reference in LGBTI discourse and an unconventional thinker who, like Pier Paolo Pasolini, whom he greatly admired, ‘always said what nobody wanted to hear’. El Palomar revives his role and his influence to recover the spirit which, in the democratisation process following the death of the dictator Francisco Franco in the 1970s, continued to detect and denounce the homophobia, racism, classism, and misogyny of the dictatorship that persisted in the recently established democracy. El Palomar also maintains the work of Cardín during the paradigm shift in the so-called second transition in Spain in the 2000s. Cardín, one of the first and few intellectuals to address AIDS and to make his illness public, explained it as follows: ‘Social systems constitute themselves ideologically by banishing bodies perceived as foreign to the margins of society […].’

The video installation Schreber is a Woman is constructed on the basis of the clinical case study and Memoirs of My Nervous Illness (1903) of Daniel Paul Schreber, a German judge who was committed to a mental asylum in Sonnenstein, Saxony, in 1894, shortly after being appointed president of the Supreme Court. She herself recounts that she felt like a woman, among other experiences understood by the medical authorities as delusions. The figure of Schreber, known to artists through Cardín, influenced Sigmund Freud and helped him to develop his theories on paranoia, schizophrenia and the Oedipus Complex. Relevant to Schreber’s story is the fact that her father, Dr. Moritz Schreber (1808–1861), was the author of several books proposing authoritarian models of physical and moral education, which enjoyed great popularity up to the mid-20^th century and contributed to driving the German psyche towards National Socialism.

The video installation is, both narratively and musically, a kind of ‘techno operetta’ in which the artists reinterpret the visions and voices described by Schreber in her memoirs from transfeminist and queer perspectives. The piece is an invitation symbolically to kill the figure of the father as a representation of a patriarchal form of morality and capitalism. The artists also want to deny the discourse of psychoanalysis that identifies homosexuality and transsexuality as a problem derived from trauma, aligning themselves with Cardin’s assertion that homosexuality is only a problem in non-integrative societies. ‘It is very interesting how Schreber, who was an atheist, in the midst of schizophrenic delirium, invents her own gods in order to connect her break with the gender and sexuality assigned to her. In our film we wanted to remove the feelings of guilt and moral judgement that Schreber herself transferred to her memoirs in her day, liberating the character sexually from the prevailing queer claims, opening up a space of joy for her – at least – in fiction.’ In the play, Schreber is played by a non-binary person, and the goddesses by two trans women.

Parallel to the film, a display case containing a series of documents and objects related to the Schreber case is exhibited. This is not documentation, rather a stand-alone work with the power to tell a story that correlates with that of the film. ‘This concept of the showcase is repeated in several of the projects we have carried out. For us, it is a basic exercise that serves to outline in empirical terms the aesthetic experience as a whole and to determine the objectivity of the work itself.’

El Palomar is a collective founded in Barcelona (ES) in 2013 by Mariokissme (Mario Páez, *1980, Campillos, ES) and R. Marcos Mota (Rafa Marcos, *1988, Tarragona, ES). They opened a space in a small flat in Barcelona Poble Sec with the aim of generating projects, processes, references and networks related to sexual dissidence and heterodox sexualities continuously redefining queer and artistic communities, generating and sharing transfeminist experiences. The space remained open for four years and later became a collective promoting research and artistic productions. Their artistic practice is multidisciplinary and includes video, performance, music, graphic art, publications and curatorial projects, based on an artistic approach rooted in a critical discourse on the different ways of being and acting. Their work has been presented in museums and cultural centres such as Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art, New York (US), MACBA Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art, Barcelona (ES), 11th Berlin Biennale, KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin (DE), MUSAC Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León (ES), HKW Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlín (DE), Espai 13, Fundació Miró, Barcelona (ES).