Sin Título (Utopía) ([Untitled [Utopia])

The Cabello/Carceller collective is Spain’s most significant contribution to gender criticism in the visual arts. The common denominator of their works lies in their questioning of hegemonic modes of representation.
After a residency in San Francisco thanks to a grant from the Fulbright Program, they produced Sin título (Utopía), a photographic series of empty swimming pools in Madrid. In the early 2000s, the cradle of the struggle for gay visibility in the US seemed to forget that the AIDS crisis was still ongoing: hence, the piece should be understood as the political reverse of David Hockney’s pop paintings of swimming pools, which celebrated the gay hedonism of the male nude. These ‘out of season’ swimming pools carry the silence and denunciation of a battle still in progress, of a pandemic still without end.

Francisco Rojas