Cabello/Carceller

MANUEL SEGADE 26
lution, was to accommodate the obligatory exteriority of the public
body social to the revelation of intimacy as a political force:
grouping sexual dissidences in somatic fictions, responding to an
intellection of the modes of production and circulation of homosexuality
in the public sphere as a political manifestation of privacy.
The forms of activist coalition of the period of the AIDS crisis,
of feminism of the 1970s, and of queer in the 2000s, supplied models
of surviving, but also models of cultural action. Paul B. Preciado
notes that homosexual desire does not exist, just like heterosexual
desire, because desire is always an arbitrary incision in an uninterrupted
and polysemic flow. 32 Nothing more queer, thus, than an
uninterrupted and polysemic form of collaborative production.
Fiction
The consciousness of the power of representation is coupled with
the confirmation of the power of fiction. When they began to exhibit
regularly, Cabello/Carceller developed Nora, the fiction of
an assistant who carried on the correspondence with the press and
institutions regarding their work, like an alter ego or a personality
filter for their labor relationship with the world of “professional”
art. In 1998 they started to introduce written stories
in their catalogs and as independent publications, 33 which they
called Fictions, turning writing into a narrative extension of the
art practice and of their politics of representation. Yet the first
indication of Cabello/Carceller’s will to fiction lies in their
titles, the use of slashes, dashes, ellipses, explanatory subtitles
is associated with the political discourse, with the manifesto,
but also with a narrative poetics evident in their videos in their
evolution in time and in their content. A casting without a film
that is the final film itself is a story in itself, and at the same
time another superimposed one about the production of film and of
stereotypes. The monologist, Western, white, male Great Story of
History has been differentiated, criticized, and reconstructed by
postmodern thinking, by feminisms and queer theory, by postcolonial
and decolonial theory. In A/O (Céspedes Case) they do precisely
that: the story of the knowledge of a forgotten historical person
is a tactical reclamation of the past on the trans-gender condition
of the present. 34
On the other hand, their photographs are always developed in
series, where the works are read in a variety of formats, establishing
relations of legibility on the exhibition wall—as in the
empty pools of Untitled (Utopia) or in the spaces of night entertainment
at the end of a party in Somewhere—or they are developed
in pairs—such as in Archive: Drag Models, where, by being accompanied
by its reference, the fiction of a person appropriated in
the posed image is in turn transformed into an appropriation that
stimulates a self-reflexive narrative chain on the game of representation.
EN