Calvary Chapel, 2022
Installation on glass
Variable size
Courtesy the artists

A moral tale

Momu & No Es have been an artistic duo since 2004. They work between Rotterdam, Barcelona and Madrid. Combining video, scenography and performance, their projects are populated with objects and visual and musical references from contemporary popular imagery, from Internet culture and from the mundane, the trivial. The artists’ concern is with elements they recontextualize and reassign meaning to, turning them into protagonists of zany stories that move in the charged zone between the familiar and the absurd, and which generate alien landscapes in terms of mood.

Momu & No Es are interested in the idols of contemporaneity, in deconstructing the strategies of production of desire based on promises of success and fun but producing frustration and depression. In this way, the artists confront us with the shattered fragments of contemporary life. The bizarre, the extraordinary, the images of the hyper-realistic, the virtual, the mythical, the cosmic: everything is reality and takes on significance in this absurd and loud remix that reflects our globalised, hyper-excited and voracious consumerist present.

As if it were a stained-glass window, the architectural intervention Calvary Chapel leads us through a narrative developed in seven ‘stations’. Calvary here stands for the succession of adversities and misfortunes suffered by a person. The chapel is a location for private prayer, in which the profane is venerated – an invocation centred on the figure of the idol, a supernatural entity venerated as if it were the divinity itself. A zoomorphic being from the Paleozoic Era, a fossilised figure from the fourth mass extinction of the Earth.

The piece, which links up to the artists’ themes in previous works such as The Aldy Chappel (2014) or Lunar Park (2017), is divided into two parts that correspond to the principle of rise and fall. With an interchangeable point of departure and destination, this work questions the very meaning of rise and fall, the Western conception of sacrifice, reward and redemption. In this reversal of the Calvary experience, steps and chapters are interwoven, with the links between them creating new readings. Underground tunnels, military settlements, an idol emerging from the churning waters, a climatic inferno, encounters in ancient convention halls… The problems that pile up, like personal debts, a growing mound of heaped objects that suffocate us. An idol devours its own spirituality. In the showroom of a pearl factory, a salesman shows the product to a group of tourists on a package tour. A worm hints at the physics of the cosmic hole and the possibility of shortcuts on the journey.  Metal reminds us of the taste in our mouth after a boozy night out. Altered states of mind lead to encounters with ‘the little beings’, about whom so much could be said… At some point we are confronted by the inability to carry on the journey, to make decisions in this sort of Trajan’s column of contemporary life, a kind of cosmorama or altarpiece of today.

These pictorial worlds, apparently naïve and delusional, that Momu & No Es design are utopian in function; they have a radically subversive potential, which the two artists consciously defend as west European women of their generation by deconstructing, by means of great humour, the culture that forms them.

Momu & No Es is an artist duo by Lucía Moreno (*1982, Basel, CH) and Eva Noguera (*1979, Barcelona, ES). They earned fine arts degrees at the University of Barcelona (ES), then went on to complete postgraduate studies in artistic research at the DAI Dutch Art Institute, Arnhem (NL). They have held solo shows in centers like Espai13, Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona (ES), 1646, The Hague (NL), MACG Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil, Mexico City (MX), CUAC Central Utah Art Center, Salt Lake City (US), Ellen de Bruijne Projects, Amsterdam (NL), Tokyo Wonder Site, Tokyo (JP), Espai Montcada, CaixaForum, Barcelona (ES). Their work has also been shown in group exhibitions such as in La Virreina Centre de la Image, Barcelona (ES), TENT, Rotterdam (NL), CA2M Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo, Madrid (ES) or the11th Biennal de La Habana (CU) and they participated in film festivals as IFFR International Film Festival Rotterdam (NL), Internationale Kurzfilmtage Winterthur (CH) or La Ola, Los Angeles (US). They live and work between the Netherlands and Spain.

An invocation of the apocalypse

To invoke is to voice an incantation or a plea for help, for a favour or protection, to a higher force. Helicon is an invocation: a brass band, composed of seven members of different ages playing a melody while trying, in a futile gesture, to draw a response from the Earth and thus instigate the end of the world. The melody is played repeatedly, like an unanswered prayer. The ceremony takes place in front of an artificial lake that has formed as a result of more than a century of mining activity in La Unión, Cartagena (Murcia). Dyed red from waste, the water smells of chemicals, but our gaze, steeped in romantic idealism, transforms the scene into a primordial, untouched landscape.

An artificial eye, that of a drone, surveys the area, reacts to the call of the music and observes the ritual taking place. The drone affords the viewer the perspective of Pegasus, the winged horse from Greek mythology who inhabits the lands called Helicon. The mountain of Pegasus, which hosts the tomb of Orpheus, is contaminated.

Tension lies in the expectation of disaster. The instruments invoke an apocalypse, a word meaning unveiling or revelation in the original Greek. The musicians aim at nature, challenging it in a desperate gesture to struggle against an invisible opponent: they want to bring to an end an inevitable war. The helicon (from the Greek helikos, ‘spiraling’) is also a brass instrument, popular in Central and Eastern Europe and played in military fanfares.

Whether in his videos or installations, Fito Conesa explores the performativity of music, the materiality of the voice, taking in an expanded conception of sound, an investigation into non-verbal communication, a search for correspondence between languages. Not so much focused on the rendering of these, but on a synaesthetic practice, which means the activation of additional sensory or cognitive pathways that are generated in these interconnections. Thus, he has worked with bands and fanfares in collective projects that have visualised the pollution of asbestos. He has converted into music the movements of enemy fleets during a naval battle. He has converted the pipes of disused organs into a new instrument that emits the sounds of times past. He has recorded a male choir made up of teenagers whose voices are in the process of breaking.  He has explored digital voices and animal communication; he has claimed the power of mining songs as popular culture and the story of collective decline. Music as a transition between times, spaces, identities, fears and longings.

Fito Conesa (*1980, Cartagena, ES) is an artist and producer with a degree in Fine Arts from Barcelona University (ES). He has given and designed workshops for the Education Department of Fundació la Caixa, Valencia (ES). He worked as an art director on the Green Santo Domingo campaign for Santo Domingo City Hall (DO) and formed part of the tutorial team of Sala d’Art Jove in Barcelona (ES). His work has been shown at various museums and festivals such as the Oslo Screen Festival 2010, Oslo (NO), Barcelona International Poetry Festival (ES), the Centro Cultural Español, Santo Domingo (DO), Matadero, Madrid (ES) and Caixafòrum, Lleida, Tarragona and Barcelona (ES). He has contributed to publications such as Zeitgeist: Variations & Repetitions (Save as… publications, 2010), Unique Window Display (Loft Publications, 2009) and Suite for Ordinary Machinery (Save as… publications, 2008), with the latter being included in the holdings of the Tate Library, London (UK), the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo Reina Sofía, Madrid (ES) and the MACBA Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art, Barcelona (ES).

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).

soo fat, 2021
Sculpted foam seats covered with silicone, hand cut by the artist with a special ham knife
Variable dimensions
Courtesy Fundación Montemadrid

Chronicles of the self. A family tale

Carne de mi carne (Meat of My Meat) is a first-person narration of the artist’s experience as a female and feminist body in her particular family and cultural environment: her parents are butchers in a small village a few kilometres from Jabugo (Huelva), known as the home of the Iberian pig and the best ham in Spain.

Composed of two episodes, Entrañas y Piel (Entrails and Skin), it is a speculative documentary that investigates the meaning that pigs and their meat have for local history, the history of her family, the convictions of the brother she has to come to terms with and who continues to work in the family business, as well as their significance for her own life. Reminiscent of the ethnographic films of the last century, the short films set out to unmask, through humour and provocation, the cultural and symbolic mechanisms that still dominate at least a part of our society. In the words of the artist: ‘It is not easy to be a woman, to be born in a small town and to acknowledge oneself as a feminist. Not yet. It is not easy. It’s not comfortable. It’s not what you hope for.’

The narrative of Entrañas includes the controversial theory of the anthropologist Priscille Touraille, who argues that a greater consumption of meat by men compared to women in prehistoric times could be one of the first causes of the development of patriarchy.

In the video installation Piel, the artist combines the reality of her family and cultural environment with reflection on identity and identities, to question roles and stances regarding gender inequalities and the determinism of genetics and origin. She examines the spaces in which women are represented and what it means to carry out manual work today, attempting to dispel some myths about rural communities based on knowledge she has acquired in person. The skin as a repository of genetics, experiences, desires, and as a surface of resistance to the aggression of a hetero-patriarchal society.

The artist invites a pig called Lepen Alcaide and members of her family and community to participate in the film. Alcaide skilfully works with the objects, spaces and settings in which she inserts her works. Moreover, performance, an essential part of her artistic practice, facilitates the creation of narratives and fictions, at the same time showing the eternal suspicion that reality is fictional in its nature. Fluidly moving between the political and the personal, her natural ability to transfer the social conflicts of the present day to subjective experience enables discourse that is both open and recognisable.

María Alcaide (*1992, Aracena, ES) graduated in fine arts from the University of Seville (ES), but also has a bachelor of fine arts of the University Paris VIII (FR) and a research master in art and design of EINA-UAB School in Barcelona (ES). Her research work has been presented in academic contexts such as the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris (ES), the Universität der Künste, Berlin (DE), the Complutense University of Madrid (ES) or the Tàpies Foundation in Barcelona (ES). Internationally, she has shown her work in Gallery Joey Ramone, Rotterdam (NL), Muu Kaapeli, Helsinki (FI), ACUD, Berlin (DE) and Reed College, San Francisco (US). She has been selected at Jeune Création and Salon de Montrouge 64, Paris (FR) and also has been artist in residence in Agora Collective, Berlin (DE), LeFugitif, Leipzig (DE) or in Artifariti, Western Sahara among others. Recently, she has received the prizes Fundació LaCaixa and Generación 2021 (La Casa Encendida), as well as different grants from the Spanish Ministry of Culture (INJUVE, Spanish College in Paris) and has been selected as artist in residence at Kunsthaus Bregenz (AT), Cité des Arts de Paris (FR) Fabra i Coats, Barcelona (ES), La escocesa, Barcelona (ES), Andalusian Center for Contemporary Creation, Cordoba (ES) or Bilbaoarte, Bilbao (ES). Her latest individual project has been exhibited in La Capella, Barcelona (ES) as part of LOOP Festival.

A hyper-realistic tale

The artist Andrea Muniáin is a trained architect and researcher. Her recent work focuses on the development of prototypes, which she calls ‘bodyscapes’. By means of walk-in sceneries that allow viewers to become part of the installation, she creates scenic narratives that intertwine physical and virtual space. Her installations reveal the repercussions of new digital technologies on subjectivities, bodies, spaces and identities, in the continuous and mutual relationship between the reality of the screens and that of the world.

DILSS. Digital Intercontinental Large Supermarkets is a prototype of a generic supermarket where images of real people are for sale: faces, bodies, fragments of bodies. There are goods on offer, a selection of best-selling bodies, employees of the month, as in any such market. What might seem like a scene from a dystopian novel or a science fiction film – a body store – is nothing more than the physical realisation of online reality.

3dScanStore is one of the many digital platforms where 3D scanned body models, i.e. photogrammetric bodies of real people who have decided to sell their digital body, are for sale. Bodies that, by becoming downloadable models, transfer their specific way of moving as well as their digital agency. What happens when we become downloadable? The marketplace decides how these bodies will move, the landscapes and screens they will forever inhabit. The artist links this factory of identities to another platform, 3Dwarehouse. This platform is a free digital catalogue used by architects and corporations as a design tool for downloading and purchasing modular construction solutions, and introducing them into the real physical space.

‘In theory, the existence of the globally interconnected platform seems to offer a whole range of formal applications. But reality shows that the most downloaded models, and therefore the most used, are the formal manifestation of generic architecture. A digital cut and paste that shows up in the material design. Rem Koolhaas published Junkspaces two years after this digital platform was created. This gave enough time to track the spread of the elements on offer. Doors, windows, furniture, false ceilings. They all look the same. They all spread virally. An effective technique for the creation of junk spaces by means of the digital download. The spam image is to bodies what the junk space is to architectural elements. The body made of plasterboard. A failed universal language? In DILSS, junk-space and spam-image blend to construct a speculative tale of the changing body as it becomes a three-dimensional model. By comparing the photogrammetric body to the modelled architectural element, it manages to reaffirm that the body continually carries all the market connotations that are attributed to the configuring elements of junk architecture. The body resembles a false ceiling. The body is like plasterboard. And in its digital form it is marketed as such.’ Andrea Muniáin

Andrea Muniáin (*1994, Tudela, ES) is an architect who graduated at the University of Alicante (ES) with a multidisciplinary artistic perspective. The development of her practice focuses on the current relationships between digitality, physicality and corporeality. Currently, Muniáin’s work explores, beyond the digital representation of the body, the political component of these same representations. Both as an artist and in her academic work, Muniáin criticizes the current aesthetic practice, analyzing how digital visualization tools enforce an aesthetic that makes all bodies look the same and standardised. This critique highlights the need to find a new body representation beyond the visual practices that currently dominate the image and understanding of the body. Her work is linked to different cultural institutions, architecture studios and universities, including La Casa Encendida, Madrid (ES), Matadero, Madrid (ES), Takk architecture, Barcelona (ES), University of Technology, Sydney (AU), IED Instituto Europeo di Design, Madrid (ES), ELISAVA Barcelona School of Design and Engineering, Barcelona (ES). Today, she combines her material production with her work as a researcher at the School of Architecture of Alicante (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).