Opening: Wednesday May 31th
Since its creation fifteen years ago, the focus on the diversity of bodies and desires has been a hallmark of the programs of the Museo Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo. The potential of the performance of bodies and the unprecedented social choreographies created by their communities is a central axis of the institution. Over time, its collections have become gradually permeated with the celebration of diversities and minor voices.
It should be noted that this is not merely a thematic bias, but an inherent aspect of this institution's mission. The contemporary art regime emerged in the mid-1960s, when a change of paradigm was taking place in the way gender policies were understood with the second wave of feminism and the LGTBI liberation movement, the class revolts of May '68 and their international reverberations, the independence of countries that had been under the power of European empires and the consequent exchange of populations that gave way to the multiculturalism that characterizes our present. Not only has contemporary art sought to give representation and visibility to the differences of bodies, but the processes of social change of the last 70 years are central to the aesthetic transformation of the world that makes up its program.
This exhibition showcases the diversity of gender in the collections of the CA2M Museum and the ARCO Foundation, from the poetics of LGTBI visibility to the recent trans aesthetics. Archipelagos of Sequins is held on the ground floor, the most public space of the museum, as a celebration of difference, the same that every early July takes place at the greatest festival of the Spanish capital: the LGTBI+ Pride.
Key pioneering figures such as George Tony Stoll or Andrés Senra are joined by new non-binary voices, such as Inês Zenha or Lucía C. Pino, and Manuel Solano's transgender radicalism. The presence of Latin Americans is an important part of this project, as in the rest of our collections, with Osías Yanov and La Chola Poblete from Argentina, Tadáskia from Brazil, and Juan Pablo Echeverri from Colombia. The title is taken precisely from a text by the Argentine queer theorist of the AIDS crisis generation, Néstor Perlongher: "Archipelagos of sequins, headdresses of iridescent feathers (with each shake of the trembling hip, the finery of a hundred flamingos floating in the air turning into pink dust), constellations of glitter making the face into yet another mask, a whole kitsch masonry, a delicate artifice, a contrived stridency collapses under the impact (let us say it) of death".
*Juan Pablo Echeverri - who had participated in key exhibitions in the short history of the CA2M Museum, such as Pop Politics - died prematurely in 2022. This exhibition is dedicated to him.
Image: Photographs: Sue Ponce. Courtesy of the CA2M Museum.
