Gabinete de Sueños
Photographic Exhibition | Carmela García
* Informatie beschikbaar in het Engels
Even since Carmela García began her artistic career in the 1990s, the construction of feminine memories and genealogies has been a central subject of her work. In her hands, this rewriting and rereading of the past becomes a subversive, emancipatory act with which she defies a patriarchal historical tradition, focused on presenting women as exceptions, as mere oddities emerging from the void, lacking in any tradition of their own.
With this search for and revival of feminine references in a variety of fields of knowledge, García seeks to reveal the existence of a symbolic world, able to affirm the values of the feminine. In this way, through the voices, stories, histories and experiences of women of the past, she delineates an artistic, feminist and lesbian cartography that connects up with her own personal history. The artist finds in these genealogies a narrative vehicle that allows her to break with the invisibility and silencing of women’s knowledge, constructing a sequence of ancestral, matrilineal understanding, a complex collective memory of affects, complicities and alliances that are revived and resonate in the present. These forms of knowledge and practice, hidden and concealed in the pleats of history, are used by García to construct genealogies, thus transcending narratives and discourses of a totalising nature, questioning exclusions and erasing the linearity of authorised, legitimated voices.
This exhibition brings together a series of works done by Carmela García from 2007 to 2022, featuring a variety of formats, languages and disciplines, including video art, drawing, photography, documentary material, maquettes and installations. In these works, life histories reverberate along with inventions, fictions and metafictions that bring into the present day a mystical realm in deep connection with nature, featuring the ancestral knowledge of women who love, create, write, paint, dance, enjoy themselves and read, women who imagine and dream of a better world. These are the dreams of Hildegard of Bingen Hildegard von Bingen and her healing stones; of the architect and designer Eileen Gray, still present inside the E-1027 House; of Marcia Celagra, an unknown artist-medium and visionary created by Carmela García herself; the dreams of Portuguese women painters, forgotten by history; and those of the women of the Lyceum Club Femenino and Sapphic circles; and of the painter Ángeles Santos, or the dreams of female artists, writers and poets in Paris between the wars, all of whom are found and preserved by Carmela García in a cabinet, little treasures meant to inspire us and help us perceive the beauty of the world.