El Palomar
Formed in 2013 by Mariokissme (Campillos, Málaga, 1980. Lives in Paris) and R. Marcos Mota (Tarragona, 1988. Lives in Barcelona).
Notes for an Eye Fire exhibition views. Photo: Miquel Coll
El Palomar’s practice embraces a wide range of disciplines that generate critical discourses around the politics and poetics of sex and gender dissidence.
Schreber is a Woman is informed by the clinical case study and memoirs of Daniel Paul Schreber, a German judge who was confined to the Sonnenstein Mental Asylum in Saxony in 1894, shortly after being appointed presiding judge of the Saxon Supreme Court. He had recounted feeling like a woman among other experiences related to shifts in gender, which was considered a form of delirium. Relevant to the case is Schreber’s father, Dr. Daniel Gottlieb Moritz Schreber, a child psychiatrist who promoted harsh, authoritarian child-rearing methods that were popular in Germany up until the mid-20th century.
Deconstructing notions of binary gender identities and the Freudian analysis of the case, the audio-visual installation reinterprets the visions and sounds described by Schreber in his Memoirs of My Nervous Illness (1903) from transfeminist and queer perspectives situated in the present.
MAKING OF
One bed for Schreber / how was Schreber is a Woman done is the making of the video installation.
About El Palomar
In 2013 El Palomar opened as a space for exhibitions and events in a 30 m2 studio in Barcelona’s Poble-sec district. Over the following three years, it evolved into a pioneering, multifaceted art project for catalysing artistic production, rethinking institutions and researching and recovering queer histories. The artist duo behind El Palomar continue to embrace a wide range of disciplines, including video, performance, music, limited editions and curatorial projects that generate critical discourses around the politics and poetics of sexual dissidence.
Their 2016 project No es homosexual simplemente el homófilo sino el cegado por el falo perdido traversed narcissism, blasphemy, miscegenation, transvestism and the murder of Pier Paolo Pasolini through a video based on an unfinished 1976 script by Alberto Cardín, one of the leading LGBT writers and activists during the Spanish transition to democracy. And their 2015 Fons, armari i figura per Ismael Smith reread the work of Barcelona-born artist Ismael Smith, who died in a US mental hospital in 1976.
El Palomar are Mariokissme & R. Marcos Mota. They recently participated in the Berlin Biennale (2020) with the work Schreber is a Woman. They have had solo shows at the Fundació Joan Miró’s Espai 13, Barcelona (2016) and La Capella, Barcelona (2016), and have performed at venues such as Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin (2017), and CentroCentro, Madrid (2017). Their recent curatorial projects include the exhibition Principios de refinamiento (Principles of Refinement) at Casal Solleric, Palma de Mallorca (2018). In 2020 the duo won the Ojo Crítico Award for Visual Arts. elpalomar.sexy
