Self-Portrait as a Fountain] is a counter-historiographic remake of Bruce Nauman's 1966 piece 

, which became a landmark work of conceptual and twentieth-century art. According to documentary sources, in the piece Nauman parodies the heroic male nude present in traditional sculpture as a metaphor for the fountain of wisdom and fertility. They show their transbutch body performing the same action as Nauman, with the intention of rethinking the idea of masculinity as something inherent to the body of cis men. The action is a ritual that they perform with the most censored political fluid of gestating bodies: menstruation. A fluid that shows his fertility, that forms part of Xeito, their cycles, their body, and their masculinity. Symbolically, they spit their menstruation ("I as a source") at androcentric Art History ®, at the history of the art of cis men written by and for cis men who have denied and made invisible discourses, desires, bodies and sexualities outside the cisheteronormative and patriarchal-colonial hegemony.

Autorretrato como fuente

Single-channel video, 3 min
VHS transferred to DVD, b/w, without sound

In this most militant piece, Cabello/Carceller appropriate the word "bollera", used as an insult for lesbians, and literally embody it: the two of them defy the categorisation involved in scrutinising another person’s face in a film portrait of the duo each eating a "bollo", or creampuff. By reappropriating the insult, one of the queer strategies par excellence, and liberating it from its erstwhile moral charge they make it once again a personal identifiable adjective.

Cabello/Carceller realizan su pieza más militante, donde se apropian del insulto bollera, referido a las mujeres lesbianas, encarnándolo de forma literal: ambas desafían la categorización que implica escrutar el rostro ajeno en un retrato fílmico del dúo comiendo un bollo cada una. La reapropiación del insulto, liberándolo de la carga moral tradicional para volverlo un adjetivo identificable como propio es una de las maniobras queer por antonomasia.

Bollos

This short film looks at queer imagery, fat-phobia, and reclamation through autobiographical narrative, black and white photography, and stop motion animation.

In Aztec mythology, the goddess Coyolxauhqui was severed into pieces by her brother, the god of war. This film recounts the lessons learned by a queer daughter from her round mother’s body, framed by the story of Coyolxauhqui. It opens with a bright gold and turquois rendering of the goddess breaking apart and trailing off the screen. It is quickly replaced by black and white photos of Pendleton Jiménez as a child beside her mother. She describes the comfort of snuggling into her mother’s big, soft body while recounting the hurtful comments about weight directed at this body. The daughter learns to take seriously her mother’s warning, “not to ever say anything bad about a person’s body.” Through childhood stories and then erotic photos of herself as a butch lover, Pendleton Jiménez attempts to reconcile the ambivalence she experiences over her own body, where maleness and femaleness collide. Using stop-motion animation, she returns to Coyolxauhqui’s story and image, looking for a way to feel beautiful. 

 was produced as part of an LGBTQ health centre program to create films about queer women’s bodies.

Butch Coyolxauhqui

 takes viewers on an evocative, thought-provoking journey through the iconoclastic life of game-changing artist Chavela Vargas. Centered around never before-seen interview footage of Chavela shot 20 years before her death in 2012, and guided by the stories in Chavela’s songs, and the myths and tales others have told about her – as well as those she spread about herself – the film weaves an arresting portrait of a woman who dared to dress, speak, sing, and dream her unique life into being.

Chavela

Instrucciones de uso delves into the analysis of masculinity as a cultural construction, as a behavioral model that could adapt to any human body regardless of its biological sex.The video is structured as an ironic visual guide in which a variety of traditionally masculine gestures, attitudes and poses are represented by a woman. By following these instructions, one could acquire a correct masculine image in a short period of time, as shown in this project, in which a basic decalogue is irreverently proposed through its protagonist.

As long as it manifests itself as a construction, masculinity has no owner and therefore can be interpreted by anyone who knows its norms.

Instrucciones de uso profundiza en el análisis de la masculinidad como una construcción cultural, como un modelo de comportamiento que podría adaptarse a cualquier cuerpo humano independientemente de su sexo biológico.El vídeo se estructura como una irónica guía visual en la que una variedad de gestos, actitudes y poses tradicionalmente masculinas son representadas por una mujer. Siguiendo estas instrucciones, se podría llegar a adquirir una imagen masculina correcta en un corto espacio de tiempo, tal y como muestra este proyecto, en el que se plantea con irreverencia un decálogo básico a través de su protagonista.

En tanto que se manifiesta como una construcción, la masculinidad no tiene dueño y por ello puede ser interpretada por cualquiera que conozca sus normas.



Instrucciones de uso

 was made in the mid-90s and represented, for obvious reasons, a thematic transgression at the time of its presentation in the Spanish context. The video travels through different spaces, among which are the contradictions implicit in personal relationships or collaborative work, and it does so through a minimalist image composition that alludes, through the use of black and white, to the first performative videos made in the 60s/70s.

A heated discussion between the two artists, the topic of which is irrelevant, serves as a sound frame for a close-up of a long kiss. During the action, faces seem to fight to occupy the center of the screen while escaping the gaze. The video is a kind of game in which a fiction with hints of reality and a reality with hints of fiction merge, causing a paradoxical ambiguity.

This work also raises the possibility of operating in the gaze with an economy of means that disrupts the viewer and prevents him from obtaining the visual pleasure that the absence of the violent discussion of the background would allow.

 fue realizado a mediados de los años 90 y supuso, por razones evidentes, una trasgresión temática en el momento de su presentación en el contexto español. El vídeo transita por diferentes espacios, entre los que se encuentran las contradicciones implícitas en las relaciones personales o en el trabajo en colaboración, y lo hace a través de una composición de imagen minimalista que alude, mediante el uso del blanco y negro, a los primeros vídeos performativos realizados en los 60/70.

Una acalorada discusión entre las dos artistas, cuyo tema es irrelevante, sirve de marco sonoro a un primer plano de un largo beso. Durante la acción, los rostros parecen luchar por ocupar el centro de la pantalla mientras escapan a la mirada. El vídeo es una especie de juego en el que se funden una ficción con visos de realidad y una realidad con visos de ficción, provocando una ambigüedad paradójica.

Este trabajo plantea asimismo la posibilidad de operar en la mirada con una economía de medios que trastoca al espectador y le impide obtener el placer visual que le permitiría la ausencia de la violenta discusión del fondo.

Un Beso

Anderson (birth name ‘Vera’) is a transsexual man who lives in a correctional facility for young people. He later meets a benevolent man, who helps him come into his gender identity and begin to dress as a man, and eventually falls in love with a woman and passing as cisgender to her family.

CW: Disturbing themes and use of outdated language 

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