El Palomar’s queer activism
In 2013, queer activists Marcos Mota and Mariokissme founded the artistic collective El Palomar. In an attempt to give visibility and support to the practices and referents of free and dissident sexualities, in one of their projects they recovered a screenplay written in 1976 by the anthropologist and activist Alberto Cardín, who was at the forefront of the struggle to free sexualities from all social stigmas during Spain’s transition to democracy.
El Palomar brought this forgotten script to the screen in an installation that is now part of the MACBA Collection. Following the presentation of the work at La Capella, Barcelona, in 2016, El Palomar explained: ‘To make a film out of this screenplay, in a way, is to re-write things from the point of view of Cardín. He had an extremely complex personality, first because he was an intellectual, and second because, socially, he was a very uncomfortable person. And this, we think, was mostly due to the fact that he understood gender theory from a queer perspective.’
