Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art
Feminist Art Base: Cabello/Carceller

Alguna parte (SomeWhere) # 28, colour photography, 120 x 180 cm.

Cabello/Carceller. Alguna parte (SomeWhere) # 28, colour photography, 120 x 180 cm., 2000.

Description:
“(…) this time [Cabello/Carceller] photograph empty bars strewn with the debris of human interaction. These photographs, like the representations of the empty swimming pools, record the evidence of presence in the absence of the body. The photographs of empty spaces always demand that the viewer fill in the blanks; we are welcomed, in this way, into the collaboration, forced almost to complete the picture in front of us, to give it meaning and narrative. We people it ourselves by allowing it to reflect back to us, not the missing self and all that remains, but the active and sometimes sinister bond that we have to the artists. This bond draws the photographer to the site of dispersal and then leaves the viewer there alone to contemplate all that has been lost and what remains to be seen. This is the collaboration we fear and desire; this is the space of queer imagining where we join our look to the look of the artists and fear that we may never climb out of the negative space into which we have fallen so willingly.” Extract from Judith Halberstam’s “Swimming to Utopia,” published in “Cabello/Carceller. Under Construction,” exhibition catalogue, Culture/Education Department, Murcia, 2004. Cabello/Carceller have worked in different series to address the gendered politics of space and have interrogated it to evidence this biased construction. Clearly informed by feminist and queer discourses they have concentrated in a representation that looks mostly for the interstices of time, for those moments when spaces shouldn’t be perceived or observed, like bars and discotheques after the party has ended…

Medium:
Photography

Tags:
gender, space, architecture, Spain, masculinity