Catalogue > At random

A scaffold and a wooden stage were designed by Cabello/Carceller and built in the cold store of the old slaughterhouse at Matadero Art Centre. A graffiti, ?Ask and tell?, dominated the platform where something had happened: the shooting of a musical short film where the leading characters were prisoner women from one of Madrid most important Penitentiaries. Off Escena: If I Were... suggests a reflection and collective action that works around the poetics of inclusion and exclusion in current neoliberal capitalist societies. Freedom, gender, economy and social violence are visually present on this video that ends with a version of the song If I Were a Rich Man, sung in the film Fiddler on the Roof by the character of patriarch Teyve. If I were.., is an incomplete sentence that, when recreated with new lyrics an music by four prisoner women, invites to reflect: would they be in prison if they had been men and rich? A critical approach to the current situations of domination that avoids the original film pro-system assimilationism, and which is now related to the experience of alternative lives and to the knowledge that we should not abandon the dream of achieving a more egalitarian world.

Cabello/Carceller (Helena Cabello and Ana Carceller) currently live and work in Madrid. Primarily concerned with issues of gender (de)construction and their intersection with space and cinema as contexts in which patterns of behaviour and the regulation of the gaze are built, Cabello/Carceller have been working together as a team on a regular basis since 1993. During the last years, their work has been included in group exhibitions such as Reality and Fiction in MMOMA in Moscow, 2011; Handlung: On Producing Possibilities, Bucharest Biennale 4 in Romania, 2010, Nuevas Historias. New View of Spanish Photography, at Kulturhuset (Stockholm, 2008), Stenersen Museum (Oslo, 2009) and Kuntsi Museum of Modern Art (Vaasa, Finland, 2010), Cooling Out at the Lewis Glucksman Gallery in Cork (Ireland, 2008), The Screen Eye or The New Image, at Casino Luxembourg (Luxemburg, 2007) or Global Feminisms at the Brooklyn Museum, New York, 2007. Among their solo shows: Off Escena: Si yo fuera? in Abierto x Obras, Matadero Madrid (2011) or Archivo: Drag Modelos at Joan Prats gallery, Barcelona and CAAM, Las Palmas de Gran Canaria (2011); Suite Rivolta, at Elba Benítez gallery (2011), A/O (Caso Céspedes), Sevilla, 2010.