Cabello/Carceller is the artistic team formed in 1992 by Helena Cabello and Carceller (Paris, 1963 / Madrid, 1964). They live and work in Madrid and teach at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Cuenca, UCLM, Spain.
Cabello/Carceller began their collaboration in the early 1990s with the aim of providing a framework for dialogue and debate on common artistic concerns. Since then, they have developed interdisciplinary work that uses different means of expression—installation, performance, video, writing, drawing, etc.—with the intention of questioning the hegemonic modes of representation in visual practices and proposing critical alternatives. Starting from a conceptual, politically committed approach, they use strategies such as appropriation, performance, and fictional storytelling to question modernist narratives that ignore political minorities while repeatedly pretending to address them.
As part of this work, they have initiated research that explores the most contradictory aspects of masculinity and helps to deconstruct the model of beauty exported by Hollywood. Their project appropriates stereotypes that intervene in the construction of this global masculinity. They usually seek out external collaborators to confront them with strange or dislocated situations or texts—which could be described as queer. Isolated and out of context, these protagonists experience a mismatch created around them, a dislocation that is enhanced by the narrative and the narrative structures on which it is based, and which often contributes to activating or expanding established meanings. These collaborative projects underscore the importance of constructing or rewriting collective poetics from divergent positions, recalling the need to study interstitial and alternative experiences, revising sexual and gender politics.
Their work has been included in Art and Queer Culture, a historical review published by Phaidon Press and written by Catherine Lord and Richard Meyer. It has also been analyzed by Jack Halberstam in The Queer Art of Failure, published by Duke University Press, as well as in the prologue to the Spanish version of Female Masculinity by the same author. They have participated in group exhibitions, such as Ways of Knowing, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, USA - 35th São Paulo Biennial – coreografias do impossível, Brazil - Acción. A Provisional History of the 90s, MACBA, Barcelona - Los Sujetos, Spanish Pavilion at the 56th Venice Biennale, Italy - Global Feminisms, Brooklyn Museum, New York and Davis Museum, Wellesley College, Massachusetts, USA - Fiction and Reality, MMOMA, MMOMA, Moscow Museum of Modern Art, Moscow - BB4 Bucharest Biennale: On Producing Possibilities, Bucharest, Romania – Latin American Visual Arts Biennial, Curitiba, Brazil – re.act feminism. A Performing Archive, Akademie der Künste, Berlin, and traveling exhibitions - New Stories. A New View of Spanish Photography and Video, Stenersen Museum, Oslo, Norway / Kuntsi Museum of Modern Art, Vaasa, Finland / Kulturhuset, Stockholm, Sweden / Royal Library, Denmark – Feminist Genealogies, MUSAC, León (Spain) – The Screen Eye or The New Image, Casino Luxembourg, Luxembourg – Cooling Out, Lewis Glucksman Gallery, Cork, Ireland — Everywhere, CGAC, Santiago de Compostela (Spain); and solo exhibitions such as A Voice for Erauso. Epilogue for a Transitional Time. Azkuna Zentroa, Bilbao - A Film Without Any Intention. After Chantal Akerman. Galería Elba Benítez, Madrid - I Am a Stranger, and I Am Moving. Galería Joan Prats, Barcelona - Draft for an Untitled Exhibition, MUAC Mexico, MARCO de Vigo, and CA2M Madrid - Gender is Political. Regelbau 411, Denmark - Lost in Transition _a performative poem, IVAM, Valencia - Rapear Filosofía: Foucault, Sontag, Butler, Mbembe, Elba Benítez Gallery, Madrid - MicroPolíticas, MicroPoéticas, Sala La Patriótica/CCEBA Buenos Aires, Argentina - Off Escena; If I Were..., Abierto X Obras, Matadero Madrid, Spain - Archive: Drag Models, Joan Prats Gallery, Barcelona and CAAM, Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain or A/O (Caso Céspedes), CAAC Seville, Spain.
