Cabello/Carceller: Footnotes

TEA Tenerife Espacio de las Artes museum opens, on Friday April 17, the exhibition Footnotes, the new project by Cabello/Carceller. The exhibition—curated by the artistic director of TEA, Sergio Rubira, with the curatorial assistance of Daniasa Curbelo—includes the new production by Cabello/Carceller, The Impossible Garden of Tefía. Prologue for a Concentration Camp. Footnotes can be visited until July 5, from Tuesday to Sunday and holidays, from 10am to 8pm. 

In Footnotes, Cabello/Carceller take their stance on that uncomfortable place where history, when read against the grain, begins to unravel, revealing not so much what it intended to tell but instead what had been left out —what failed to be integrated into the claimed dominant narrative. Instead, what remained between the lines, at the margins, or reduced to footnotes, persists and challenges that which sought to get imposed as the sole version. This is not about recovering forgotten figures in a gesture that would return them intact to the discourse—as if that were possible—but about exposing the very conditions of their erasure, showing the mechanisms that caused their disappearance, while simultaneously compelling us not to take for granted either the acquired knowledge or that which, through repetition, has eventually become natural.

Céspedes, Erauso, or Agustina González—some of the projects’ main figures—thus appear as what Carla Lonzi called “unexpected subjects”: as lives that, even in their own time, overflowed any attempt at classification—multiple, unstable, contradictory identities that could not be defined without violence and that, precisely for that reason, proved problematic for a binary thinking that needs to name, label, and classify. It is in that unpredictability—in that resistance to being captured within a category—that the possibility opens up for thinking them today as part of a possible trans genealogy: one that goes beyond, that is not articulated as continuity or origin, but as a series of displacements, interruptions, and echoes activated from the present.

In this sense, the new work The Impossible Garden of Tefía. Prologue for a Concentration Camp, about the disgraceful penal colony established in Fuerteventura during the dictatorship, introduces a necessary diversion, as it shifts that genealogy toward a recent past while announcing a terrifying future in which mechanisms of control are not exceptional but part of a persistent logic. 

These works do not seek to complete a history, because there are multiple histories. Nor do they merely occupy its margins; they expand it. They act like footnotes that, once read, urge to go back to the assumed fundamental text forcing a rereading, provoking distrust, rendering it suspicious, introducing a twist that alters its meaning, and reveals a memory unable to attain definition.

The Impossible Garden of Tefía. Prologue for a Concentration Camp
In The Impossible Garden of Tefía. Prologue for a Concentration Camp, the aim is not to reconstruct the loathsome memory of a place, but to displace it, situating it in an unstable time where past and future overlap, as if history, far from closing, insisted on repeating itself in other forms.

The Tefía Agricultural Penal Colony —actually a concentration camp— was active between 1954 and 1966. People persecuted for their dissidence, not only sexual, were imprisoned there and subjected to forced labor, hunger, abuse, and systematic violence. The concentration camp functions here not only as a site of memory to be read at a distance, but as a warning reactivated in the present. Time collapses into a present that is simultaneously past and future.

The garden—etymologically refers to a fenced space, maybe to the walls of the concentration camp—is revealed here as a new device of control: a seemingly ordered place where decisions are made about what grows and what must be uprooted, where nature, like bodies, is domesticated, classified, and purged. There was no garden, no paradise—it was impossible—and yet that fiction about the Canary Islands persists, sustained by images that, as in Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights, place the native dragon tree as the Tree of Life, an emblem of an Eden projected onto the islands. A myth that, once appropriated, becomes a promise that conceals its reverse: a tool of colonization, as botanical gardens served to acclimatize plants extracted and transported from their native territories.

It is in this shift—from garden to concentration camp, from paradise to inferno—that the work builds a science-fiction fable, a near dystopia—perhaps too near—in which the Tefía camp reappears, reactivated, as new dissident subjects occupy once more that space under new but equally ruthless forms of management and control, not unknown to current production systems. Among the quarry stones, what emerges is not so much a reconstruction as an insistence: that of a past that lingers on, of a future that, despite its apparent novelty, resembles too closely what was assumed to have been left behind. A door remains open tough, that of resistance. “I am a stone, I resist”. Sergio Rubira

Cabello/Carceller (Helena Cabello, Paris, 1963 / Carceller, Madrid, 1964), Gold Medal for Merit in Fine Arts in 2024, began their collaboration in the nineties. Their interdisciplinary practice investigates body politics, gender identity, and sexual dissidence within the context of contemporary art. Through a critical gaze, their work questions normative discourses and proposes alternative forms of visibility, resorting to strategies that destabilize the canons of hegemonic visual language.

Their work has been shown extensively in national and international institutions, including group exhibitions at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, the 35th São Paulo Biennial, the Spanish Pavilion at the 56th Venice Biennale, MACBA, the Centre Pompidou, Tranzit, the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (MNCARS), and the Brooklyn Museum, as well as solo exhibitions at MUAC, CA2M, Azkuna/Zentroa, Museo Patio Herreriano, or IVAM. In 2024, they were finalists for the MACBA Foundation Prize. They also develop teaching and research activities linked to university institutions (University of Castilla-La Mancha) and independent training spaces. This research dimension reinforces the processual and critical nature of their work, which challenges both the art system and dominant narratives.