CA
ES
EN
Number 12, year 2022
Revista Catalana de Museologia

Issues, accomplishments and demands around the LGTBI Museums project

Publication date: 12/01/2022


Narrative

Publication date: 12/01/2022

Narrative

Abstract

The following article covers the author’s experience as a curator of some of the main guidelines of the LGTBI Museums project, developed by seven cultural institutions in Barcelona in collaboration with the LGTBI Center of the same city, since June 2021 to January 2022. Some of the strategies developed by the author at the National Art Museum of Catalonia and the Maritime Museum of Barcelona linked to this initiative will be analyzed. Their goal—to incorporate queer narratives in all cultural fields.

“Museums are no longer what they used to be,” one hears in the halls of many cultural institutions and even in university departments of Art History. It is probably the response of some reactionary users, irritated by the new routines that have been incorporated into art institutions on a global scale for years. From a queer perspective, in which it is common to resignify contempt and take over it, we might add: “Luckily, museums are no longer what they used to be.”

Museums as institutions have constantly received endless criticism, diagnoses, and jolts. They have been accused of being a place stemming from national propaganda with colonial and extractivist roots—of being a container of masculine, white, classist, and heterosexual imaginaries, and of displaying an either distant and elitist or trivializing, superficial and pompous attitude. Museums have been put under the spotlight as protagonists of aggressive processes of gentrification, of politico-economic speculation, and of being, in short, a careless place, both towards their own environments and towards their workers, either hired or, above all, outsourced. They have been attacked as institutions blended with factual powers from the past, the present, and most likely from a very near future too.

It is a complicity that translates into several routines that affect their daily lives. And I would like to highlight one of them—the assumption that in the rooms of a museum we will only confirm what we have already been told is relevant, and that it is so for very specific reasons, which must be also identified. This dynamic spreads beyond the walls of a museum—schools, universities or tourist guides also indicate not only which pieces should we celebrate, but also in which exclusive way should we read them.

Don't get me wrong. I do not intend to make an allegation of “everything goes” nor of the free game of interpretations. I am an art historian and I understand that the contextualization of artistic practices is completely useful and stimulating. However, precisely because I am an art historian, I also know the different drifts that the same work or the same subject acquires throughout history when it comes into relation to different contexts, periods and users. The uses and connotations of Mars, god of war, are not the same in the hands of Sophocles as in Velázquez, Canova or Napoleon. So, what is the problem with new users being able to generate new uses for our inherited heritage? And specifically, users that have been traditionally expelled from museums and from the history of art and culture. Lots of things can be done with “the goods inherited from our parents,” that is, with heritage, despite all people who are against it. And the LGTBI Museums project confirms this.

LGTBI Museums is an initiative born from the Museums and Publics Working Group, a space for dialogue where workers from different cultural institutions in Barcelona share routines, issues, and desires. One of these desires raised a few months ago the need to make sexual and gender diversity visible and celebrated through its collections or mediation activities. Thus, in collaboration with the LGTBI Center of Barcelona, the Maritime Museum of Barcelona, the National Art Museum of Catalonia, the Joan Miró Foundation, the Catalan Museum of Archaeology, the Museum of Natural Sciences of Barcelona, the Design Museum of Barcelona and Sant Cugat Museums thought of a queer program, mostly organized around the official date of gay pride, 28 June. Thanks to my relationship with the National Art Museum of Catalonia since 2019, which I will later refer to, I became a collaborator in the artistic curation of the project, working specifically with this very museum, the Maritime Museum of Barcelona and the LGTBI Center, and advising the Joan Miró Foundation and the Catalan Museum of Archaeology, which would eventually collaborate with researcher and artist blanca arias.

Although we will focus on my specific experience at the National Art Museum of Catalonia and the Maritime Museum of Barcelona, we must highlight and briefly summarize all contributions, starting with those made by blanca arias, which I had the pleasure of enjoying. On the one hand, we mention her proposal “A body as a universe” for the Joan Miró Foundation, divided into two different experiences. The first consisted of a downloadable audio to listen to before ascending the base of Montjuïc, in which her warm voice and the atmospheric and musical accompaniment generated by edu rubix predisposed our bodies to a conscious state permeable to any surrounding reality. The second experience took the form of a guided tour capable of taking Miró’s work as a hotbed of queer powers. On the other hand, blanca proposed “When marble dances,” consisting once more of two formalizations that reviewed a Roman bust located at the beginning of the twentieth century in Empúries and preserved in the Catalan Museum of Archaeology. The first experience was a video and an action (together with edu rubix, Heidi Ramírez, Virginia Rovira and Rico) that could be enjoyed next to the bust inside the museum, where this binary and anachronistic projection of cultural schemes was executed with a critical spirit, to finally make a defense of the flexibility of LGTBIQ projections on traces of the past that store seeds of hope and queer utopia.

Also, the proposal by the Museum of Natural Sciences of Barcelona should be highlighted because it has been confirmed as the starting point of a larger project on the long term. Because, after a first incursion in LGTBI contents by programming a talk by transsexual PhD in physics and activist Judith Juanhuix within her cycle of social gatherings called “Club of male and female lunatics” during Pride Month, the museum has come up with yet a more important proposal. While I write these lines, the development of the “An LGTBI+ Look at Planet Life” exhibition has been presented. It consists of twelve panels that establish LGTBIQ key readings of the museum's permanent collection, and that reveal the existence of the richness of sex-anatomical experiences and of desire beyond the human realm.

Finally, we must mention the proposals of Sant Cugat Museums and the Design Museum of Barcelona. The first proposed “Cliché-Breaking Contest: The Story with Different Perspectives,” in which, as a participatory visit, LGTBI narratives could be traced in unexpected places and times. The second incorporated five stickers under the title “Unisex - Agender - Genderless” with information able to reread some of the pieces of the sample “The Dressed Body. Silhouettes and Fashion (1550-2015).” Undoubtedly, the heritage of the two institutions could be opened even more strongly to links with LGTBI experiences, especially if we consider that we are talking about collections closely linked to a material culture (such as clothing) fundamental to the processes of identity construction.

We must not forget that the LGBTI Center celebrated this initiative and a fruitful alliance with the “Excited Beasts” project, in which I decided to collaborate with the transvestites Ken Pollet and Norma Mor to carry out a full-day workshop where participants could trace and embody some of the queer archetypes posed by the seven collaborating institutions by going out to occupy the streets and dance like animals.

1. When rebellious looks and subversive sounds reverberate in the National Art Museum of Catalonia’s collection

At the beginning of 2019 I received a surprising assignment—to propose four guided tours of the National Art Museum of Catalonia collection with an LGTBI perspective. These would take place during Pride Month, that is, in June of the same year. As a contemporary art specialist, I doubted whether I would be able to take on such a challenge, and to do so with respect and in an affectionate and political manner. This collection is not a queer one, I thought at first. Almost none of the exhibited pieces include experiences related to non-normative gender or sexual identities. It is really difficult to think of a historicist visit of the collection from homosexual or trans* perspectives, e.g., because the vast majority respond to social spheres and factual heteropatriarchal powers. It would be far easier if it was a collection of Greco-Latin narratives, I thought hazy and nervous. (1)

Then I remembered a lecture that marked me in my early years as an Art History student, and that coincided with that intense moment when one discovers queer theory. It was a round table organized by Paul Preciado at the MACBA where film historian Alberto Mira spoke about his essay “Miradas insumisas. Gays y lesbianas en el cine,” (2) explaining in an introductory way how, as a young homosexual in a little town, he cultivated a rebellious gaze towards Hollywood cinema that allowed him to establish personal ties with fundamentally heterosexual narratives. Mira explicitly spoke of the existence of “currents of emotional and erotic sympathy that spoke to me from the screen, even if they did so from heterosexual situations.” And based on this premise, he invited all those non-normative and underrepresented identities in dominant narratives to install a crack by cultivating a deviant, unauthorized and undesirable taste, to establish a rebellious gaze that would allow elements of personal experience to dialogue with works (apparently) remote to LGTBIQ experiences, such as in this case with the pieces on the National Art Museum of Catalonia collection. So, I decided to cultivate a rebellious gaze towards the museum, naming the project as “Rebellious Gazes: Readings of the Collection with an LGTBI perspective.” This collection has already spoken of cardinals, wealthy merchants, believers, and bishops. Its works have already spoken through heterosexual professors and researchers. But it had never talked about us, and we had never used it.

My second decision forced me to consider what kind of dialogue I wanted to cultivate. It may seem like a simple methodological question, but it does affect the sensitive tone of the project. And it would have been really easy to come up with a game of blasphemous rebellious gazes that would belligerently confront a collection behind which factual powers traditionally violent towards non-normative identities are hidden. (3) However, this is not how I understand queer ways, which are much closer, in my opinion, to affection, to seduction, and to strength. And I could frame this strength in an academic way, citing authors such as José Esteban Muñoz, who defended notions such as “queer utopia,” in relation to the possibility that past aesthetic productions may store traces of a utopia that must be reactivated in the present. But no academic framework is needed to make visible or justify that rebellious gesture that people who do not identify with the dominant normative imaginaries have been doing for centuries by sneaking into images that were not made for us, appropriating motives that are useful to us and that were not intended for us, and ultimately displacing, cracking and entrenching ourselves.

Once the framework was established, another doubt arose which, in my opinion, has been part of some successes and some failures of my own proposal: how would I be able to pick up on queer diversity in an hour and a half long visits, with the limitation of working with a specific collection such as the one of the National Art Museum of Catalonia. The first way to solve this issue was to seek the accompaniment of four collaborators, four friends, linked either to LGTBIQ experiences or projects, or both, naturally. In the end, the riders of the apocalypse were María Gómez, activist and researcher specializing in intersexuality; Aimar Pérez Galí, curator and dancer with Jaime Conde-Salazar, a dance critic and transformist; Nancy Garín, independent researcher, journalist and art historian; and Licorka Fey, drag and host artist, member of the Futuroa collective.

Next to each of them a visit was designed in which we invited spectators to cultivate a rebellious gaze, using various resources—a portable mini-projector that threw rebellious images on walls, pedestals or on the floor, making some materials that are often overshadowed by the dominant heteropatriarchal narrative appear as dissident ghosts; the performative interventions of some of the collaborators; and the use of other physical resources such as the portable museum around Ismael Smith generated by El Palomar.

With the support of these resources, I devised a sequence of rebellious narratives and dialogues with my collaborators. From the rooms dedicated to the collection of Romanesque art, the sculptural typologies of Christ crucified, either majestic or off the cross, served us to collect those uses of iconography of martyrdom by creators affected by homophobic violence, especially following the outbreak of AIDS/HIV in the 1980s. In this sense, the collaboration with Aimar Pérez, Jaime Conde-Salazar and Nancy Garín was fundamental, as the former are responsible for the project “The Touching Community” (a kind of performative mourning to continue crying those Spanish-speaking dancers who died as a result of AIDS/HIV). And Garín is a member of the Re Team, with which he develops the project “Anarchivo Sida,” thanks to which we were also able to access these rebellious uses of the iconographies of the Passion from the perspective of LGTBIQ activism in Latin America. In the Gothic art rooms, we claim the angelic iconographies as easily claimable territories from the inter* activisms, and together with María Gómez we actually discovered some personal and rebellious uses of the iconography of the black angel. (4) In the transition from Gothic art to Modern art, we trace the evolution of the iconography of St. Sebastian to verify not only its historical link to homoerotic experiences but, again, its uses for a part of contemporary queer activisms as a narrative of the reaffirmation of persecuted and punished identities. Finally, in the art galleries of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Ismael Smith's career helped us to find non-binary artistic genealogies, relating them to current proposals for critical transvestism, as demonstrated by a set of performances by drag artist Licorka Fey.

The four visits were welcomed with enthusiasm and fascination, and one of the successes that we must celebrate of this project is actually that, thanks to the insistence of the team of educators, it will continue to be in the Museum beyond the first stipulated date. We can say that the National Art Museum of Catalonia has been brave and responsible by installing this proposal, not only as a visit to offer to groups of adults throughout the year, but as an activity for a school-age audience, mainly of a high school and university profile. However, some of the most explicit criticisms arose in the preparation process of the adaptation by the museum's education team. In a dialogue with Júlia Llull, the content coordinator of the educators team who is responsible for this adaptation, the fact that the rebellious looks are "too gay" was put on the table, understanding the critical subtext around the absence of queer women’s experiences.

My first mental reaction was to question my own script provided to the museum’s education department, and I wondered whether the emphasis was really on non-binary experiences (angelic iconography in relation to intersex experiences, the advocacy of Ismael Smith as a non-binary trajectory, and so on). And while the visit does contribute to the visibility of the violence, the demands, and the rebellious gazes of one of the most underrepresented groups such as the intersex, it is true that it is not able to collect the imaginaries of queer women with the same force. Thus, aside from the fact that the concepts of “man” and “woman” are altered and revised from the LGTBIQ trenches, we must humbly confirm the fact that the oversight of lesbian experiences in this visit was present once again, victim of the double erasure to which this group has been historically subjected, as women and as lesbians.

For this reason, I decided to expand and stretch the thread of one of the sequences that was only pointed out in the four visits and the provided script, working around the portraits of Colette and Marta Vidal, made by Jacques-Émile Blanche and Lluïsa Vidal. A rebellious constellation unfolds from these pieces, and not only it allows us to trace invisible lesbian genealogies, but also to pose polyamorous and non-binary narratives and to reflect critically on the construction of a masculine voyeur gaze throughout the history of art. In addition, in this adaptation by the museum's own education team, this initial lack of lesbian representation has been corrected by the incorporation of Marisa Roësset's “Rest,” a work that was not on display at the time of the first four visits and which finally includes a proud self-representation by a lesbian creator. (5)

In this way, the courage of the museum is reaffirmed in this effort to try and become a queer museum beyond June 28. Not only does the institution offer this visit on a regular basis and for school groups (which posed a high demand at the beginning of the 2021-22 academic year), but it also integrates mediation proposals linked to the axes of its programming on a permanent basis. Thus, to cite the last example in which I collaborated, aside from the set of activities that are highlighting the expansion of the rooms of the collection around the Civil War with the title “Art, conflict and memory,” we organized two podcasts of “Subversive Sounds: Voices, Guerrillas and LGTBI Shelters.” In both these programs, not only have we enjoyed many collaborators once again (Laura Vila, Teo Pardo, Lidia García, Cinta Moreno), but we also played with a rebellious triangulation in which the museum's collection, queer experiences contemporary to the chronologies of its pieces, and the contemporary dialogues around the chosen themes are intertwined. (6)

 

2. The desire becomes fluid in the Maritime Museum of Barcelona

The next leg of the LGTBI Museums project in which I collaborated intensely, and which also extends far beyond the ephemeris of pride revolves around the curation of the exhibition “Desire Flows Like the Sea,” organized by the Maritime Museum of Barcelona and scheduled from June 28 2021 to January 2022. 
The appearance of this commission, as in the National Art Museum of Catalonia, is not solely due to Pride Month or in an exclusive relationship with the LGTBI Museums project. We should not forget that both institutions have been working on the incorporation of feminist narratives and experiences for some years now, and that, in the case of the Maritime Museum, this claim is even more urgent and titanic given that the maritime sphere is a professional field historically monopolized by men. Thus, while the National Art Museum of Catalonia has been offering virtual tours and guided tours with a feminist gaze for years, the Maritime Museum has installed the exhibition “Women and the Sea,” organized several mediation activities and distributed permanent flyers in its rooms, contextualizing their narratives for the visibility of the work by women in the maritime professional field and through the incorporation of a critical gaze with a gender perspective. 
Considering these first renovations, thanks to which “museums fortunately are no longer what they used to be,” we think that there is an organic drift towards the awareness of the historical absence of non-normative identities in exhibition spaces, and in many other places, of course. So, despite unfriendly and allied debates around the subject of feminism, the invisibility and violence perpetrated by patriarchy has similarly affected women, queer identities, racialized and precarious people, and functionally or mentally diverse people, among many other subjects. Following the incorporation of feminist narratives into museums, we find inevitably an emphasis on queer experiences… whether these two areas may or should be separated today.
Moreover, we must celebrate not only the introduction of this type of content and perspectives, but also the feminist ways of working of the staff in these institutions. Unfortunately, due to their scarcity, we must value the affection, empathy, dialogue and flexibility of all the people involved: Mireia Mayolas, head of the education and activities department of the Maritime Museum, and the entire team of activities, mediation and cultural programming of the Maritime Museum— David Pablo, Norma Vélez, and Maria León.
In fact, the very idea of the exhibition was part of a first very friendly and enriching debate with Mireia Mayolas. We questioned a common thesis the museum has worked with—that the existence of relationships between men on the high seas is due to a kind of desperate gesture when professionals spend more than three months on the sea without any women in a very small, confined space. Although this hypothesis might fit in some cases, defending it as the only plausible reason seemed to me not only strange, but dangerous. Because defending only this argument implies the assumption that homoerotic relations on the high seas take place only because of an unresolved necessity within an occasionally flexible heterosexual desire. Obviously, knowing (as it has been historically stated) that a ship is some kind of marine synthesis of the terrestrial social sphere, we must assume that, just as there are homosexual relations on the ground, they also do happen at the mercy of the sea swings. And in order not to fall into the realm of presumption, I went on to seek witnesses to confirm this.
The exhibition is divided into two narrative blocks. On the one hand, a historicist sequence that contextualizes homosexual relationships since the sixteenth century; on the other hand, a block linked to homoerotic imaginaries of the sailor, set up by gay creators of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The first of these blocks contains engravings and records of judicial and criminal proceedings of the General Archive of the Indies confirming the existence of homosexual relations. The vast majority of them was topicalized under the accusation of sailors or other maritime professionals to have committed the “nefarious sin,” that is, the immoral act that violated the heterosexual Catholic obligation of reproductive sex within marriage. While all of these documents rewrite a history of homosexual relationships from the point of view of punishment, guilt, abuse, torture, punishment, and annihilation, they confirm both the persistence and the permanence of these practices on the high seas.
 

In relation to the sequence around the nefarious sin that unfolds in the sample through the incorporation of several materials (reproduction of engravings, original illustrations by Ariadna Veas, excerpts from the General Archive of the Indies), it seemed to me that it was essential to incorporate the audiovisual trilogy “Nefandus” (2013) by artist Carlos Motta (Colombia, 1978), because it connected with two fundamental issues raised in the exhibition. (7)

First, this trilogy served me to raise visibility for a bet (still timid, but eager to expand) on an intersectional practice that not only considered notions such as the orientation of desire, in this case, but also others of a racial nature. Inevitably, a Maritime Museum with historicist roots bumps into colonial-imperialist narratives. However, we must ask ourselves again how often these issues are raised in our cultural spaces and for how long. We already know the answer, despite some recent movements that are taking place in several European art institutions. Motta's works were presented as a small grain of sand in this titanic promise of change. Because, throughout his footage, we access a story about the violent imposition of sexual and gender categories that impoverished and annihilated the diversity of the colonized territories, as well as the use of the term “sodomite” as one more of the strategies that made it possible to morally justify the conquest and annihilation of a territory bend to vice and barbarism. So, Motta's audiovisual works insist on this crossroads of racist and homophobic experiences. (8)

 

Secondly, the significant presence of artistic practices led to a once again affectionate debate with the person in charge of the museum's education and activities department. In an institution that fundamentally generates knowledge by means of historical stories, it could seem that artistic practices would move away of this purpose. And it is not a simple prejudice, but a consequence of some ways of proceeding in the field of art history. I am referring to that dynamic according to which visual arts have been studied from decontextualized formalist readings—from romantic visions obsessed with sublime or beautiful experiences, or, of course, from experiences of spectacular veneration of geniuses and the great artworks. However, taking up the essay by Aurora Fernández Polanco, “Visual Critique of Solitary Knowledge,” there is an art history capable of moving away from the life of forms to pose other forms of life. And there are methodologies in art history that understand the artistic artifact as a cultural device which is therefore traversed by social, political, and economic information, and more. Thus, the challenge consisted of making the incorporated artistic imaginaries able to be enjoyed as creations and used at the same time as social catalysts that would allow us to trace the evolution of homosexual relationships from the sixteenth century to the present day.

So, Motta’s trilogy “Nefandus” allowed us to trace the construction of Spanish virility in the colonial period in parallel with the topicalization of the colonized as effeminate, vicious or sodomite; references to Jean Genet or Benjamin Britten were presented as examples of the use of the archetype of the homosexual sailor as a vehicle for convulsive processes of identity construction in deeply homophobic contexts; Tom of Finland’s drawings reminded us of the importance that they had for many homosexuals to feel safe in public space in the 1970s and 1990s; and the kitsch and camp imaginaries of Pierre & Gilles helped us to observe how the presence of a gay sailor can even creep into an Act Up-Paris demonstration.

These artistic imaginaries continue to trace a journey through the violence and the pleasures that homosexual sailors have suffered throughout history, until reaching recent circumstances that are shocking for their deep homophobia, such as the law “Don't ask, don't tell,” which was active in the United States from 1994 to 2011. Even so, the challenge is still to be able to generate knowledge around professional experiences in the maritime field of Barcelona. This is the reason why we have included an email address in the last panel, inviting everybody to have a dialogue with local LGTBI professionals and having already established two contacts of deep interest.

All this confirms that the exhibition, or the mediation activities of the National Art Museum of Catalonia, are not understood as an end but as a starting point. If museums need to add the acronym “LGTBI” as a claim it is because, for the most part, they are not LGTBI Museums. Just as they are not feminist museum, nor decolonial museums, nor many other things that could be expected from this sort of space. This is why our shared responsibility is to demand the insistence and permanence of these narratives and ways of doing things. In this case, to request that genealogies constructed from heritage institutions to be able to map and root a historically invisible memory, so that queer experiences, in this case, are not just spontaneous dialogues that creep in as ghostly images through a projector.

Notes


(1)

I did so thinking, above all, of two previous projects with similar contents, although with different approaches. I am referring to the proposals “Inclusive Love” (Thyssen Museum), “The Other’s Gaze. Spaces of difference” —Museo del Prado—, in which both institutions developed a set of files or itineraries on their web pages, differentiated posters and audio guides, emphasizing LGTBI contents in their collections during Pride Month in 2017. Although these tours are still present on their websites and Museo del Prado produced a brief catalog, the audio guides and posters were removed after the end of June that very year.

(1)

I did so thinking, above all, of two previous projects with similar contents, although with different approaches. I am referring to the proposals “Inclusive Love” (Thyssen Museum), “The Other’s Gaze. Spaces of difference” —Museo del Prado—, in which both institutions developed a set of files or itineraries on their web pages, differentiated posters and audio guides, emphasizing LGTBI contents in their collections during Pride Month in 2017. Although these tours are still present on their websites and Museo del Prado produced a brief catalog, the audio guides and posters were removed after the end of June that very year.

(2)

Mira, Alberto, Miradas insumisas. Gays y lesbianas en el cine. Barcelona: Egales, 2008, p. 18.

(2)

Mira, Alberto, Miradas insumisas. Gays y lesbianas en el cine. Barcelona: Egales, 2008, p. 18.

(3)

We refer for example to works by León Ferrari, Abel Azcona, Maurizio Cattelan or Eugenio Merino.

(3)

We refer for example to works by León Ferrari, Abel Azcona, Maurizio Cattelan or Eugenio Merino.

(4)

Gómez generated a video essay with the National Art Museum of Catalonia's audiovisual team in which, along with multiple iconographies from the collection, one could hear: “I am like an angel, yes, I am an angel, black, a black angel. That's how I identified myself at the age of fifteen, it was my pseudonym, it represented me. I remember the image—a straight, static body, looking down, with long, straight hair, black; a long, tight, black dress, and two huge, black wings. This image spoke of me, it described my present. When I was told that something didn’t fit, that my body was different, pathological, sterile; that something was going on with sexual characteristics, with sex… sex. My genitals said I was a girl, my chromosomes said I was little, and my internal organs said nothing. I was a girl, a teenager, a woman. I had always been a woman. Not anymore? No one taught me to read my body otherwise, no one read me otherwise. What am I? Everything is diffuse, strange, incoherent, sad, dark, black. Silences, inner voices—these are my angels. They help me find a light, a light of hope, a reference. They break established body canons, just like me. They are supernatural beings, like me. They are fiction, like binarism. Angels and I subvert the rules—binary rules and heteronormative rules. We are a chess check on heteropatriarchy, on the Christian moral order, on the system. Have you seen the fallen angels of the National Art Museum of Catalonia? I am empowered by them. They represent disobedience. They rebelled against God's commandments and were cast out of heaven. That's why they cut off their wings. Something similar happens to intersex people. Our bodies are on the margins, so they are checked, diagnosed, mutilated. They cut off our wings to restore order, they silence us, and cast us out of heaven and Earth. Now is the time to reveal ourselves. We are here. We were always there. We claim our wings. We fly high. We represent all this diversity, disorder. We are natural beings— and a tad supernatural. We want to be free, just like you. Equal. Or is it so that some wings are more worthy than others? Signed: a black angel. Just one more—we are many.” Certainly, after coming into contact with rebellious looks like those of María Gómez, one can no longer see angels in the same way.

(4)

Gómez generated a video essay with the National Art Museum of Catalonia's audiovisual team in which, along with multiple iconographies from the collection, one could hear: “I am like an angel, yes, I am an angel, black, a black angel. That's how I identified myself at the age of fifteen, it was my pseudonym, it represented me. I remember the image—a straight, static body, looking down, with long, straight hair, black; a long, tight, black dress, and two huge, black wings. This image spoke of me, it described my present. When I was told that something didn’t fit, that my body was different, pathological, sterile; that something was going on with sexual characteristics, with sex… sex. My genitals said I was a girl, my chromosomes said I was little, and my internal organs said nothing. I was a girl, a teenager, a woman. I had always been a woman. Not anymore? No one taught me to read my body otherwise, no one read me otherwise. What am I? Everything is diffuse, strange, incoherent, sad, dark, black. Silences, inner voices—these are my angels. They help me find a light, a light of hope, a reference. They break established body canons, just like me. They are supernatural beings, like me. They are fiction, like binarism. Angels and I subvert the rules—binary rules and heteronormative rules. We are a chess check on heteropatriarchy, on the Christian moral order, on the system. Have you seen the fallen angels of the National Art Museum of Catalonia? I am empowered by them. They represent disobedience. They rebelled against God's commandments and were cast out of heaven. That's why they cut off their wings. Something similar happens to intersex people. Our bodies are on the margins, so they are checked, diagnosed, mutilated. They cut off our wings to restore order, they silence us, and cast us out of heaven and Earth. Now is the time to reveal ourselves. We are here. We were always there. We claim our wings. We fly high. We represent all this diversity, disorder. We are natural beings— and a tad supernatural. We want to be free, just like you. Equal. Or is it so that some wings are more worthy than others? Signed: a black angel. Just one more—we are many.” Certainly, after coming into contact with rebellious looks like those of María Gómez, one can no longer see angels in the same way.

(5)

In another of the special audiovisual materials generated with the museum for some online visits I decided to have Ken Pollet, drag king and performer. On this occasion, and in a similar way to what happened to Licorka Fey, those non-binary genealogies from Smith and Colette were highlighted, with a special emphasis on the “butch” attitude and its claims and new updates from contemporary drag strategies.

(5)

In another of the special audiovisual materials generated with the museum for some online visits I decided to have Ken Pollet, drag king and performer. On this occasion, and in a similar way to what happened to Licorka Fey, those non-binary genealogies from Smith and Colette were highlighted, with a special emphasis on the “butch” attitude and its claims and new updates from contemporary drag strategies.

(6)

You can check out the first one of these meetings at the following link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v5XUQ0A0nAI&t=1181s.

(6)

You can check out the first one of these meetings at the following link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v5XUQ0A0nAI&t=1181s.

(7)

The trilogy consists of the works “Nefandus,” “Shipwrecks,” and “The Vision of the Defeated” (“Nefandus,” “Naufragis,” and “La visió dels vençuts”).

(7)

The trilogy consists of the works “Nefandus,” “Shipwrecks,” and “The Vision of the Defeated” (“Nefandus,” “Naufragis,” and “La visió dels vençuts”).

(8)

To expand on this issue, we recommend reading Federico Garza's essay Quemando mariposas: Sodomía e imperio en Andalucía y México, siglos XVI-XVII. Barcelona: Laertes, 2002.

(8)

To expand on this issue, we recommend reading Federico Garza's essay Quemando mariposas: Sodomía e imperio en Andalucía y México, siglos XVI-XVII. Barcelona: Laertes, 2002.

Sections

Keywords

Share