Las Hijas de Felipe on Una voz para Erauso by Cabello/Carceller

With the work Una voz para Erauso. Epílogo para un tiempo trans (A Voice for Erauso. Epilogue for a Trans Time, 2022), by artist duo Cabello/Carceller, Las Hijas de Felipe (Felipe’s Daughters) set in motion La Favorita, a series of interviews within the Museo’s new programme which invites public figures to choose their favourite work from the Museo Reina Sofía Collections, sharing their personal story around it: how they discovered it, their experience with it, and why they feel it is special ahead of other works. By virtue of the gazes of people from the cultural sphere, many from outside the art world, a dialogue between artwork and guest opens, enriching the work’s meaning and threading together new encounters with art.

Carmen Urbita and Ana Garriga are behind Las Hijas de Felipe, a podcast of historical and cultural dissemination which explores the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries though a contemporary and irreverent lens. In this interview for La Favorita, they explain their resistance, shared with Cabello/Carceller, in speaking on their podcast about Catalina de Erauso, the “Ensign Nun”. Her portrait, painted around 1625 by Juan van der Hamen y León and conserved in the Kutxa Foundation, is the centrepiece of the video installation Una voz para Erauso, where three non-binary people speak their Erauso-related reflections aloud.

Erauso is a controversial figure, and with a life story packed with episodes of violence in the colonised lands of the Spanish Empire. At birth she was given the name Catalina and spent her childhood in a convent of Dominican nuns, until she decided to escape by adopting a male identity. For many years she travelled around, as a soldier and merchant, Chile, Peru, Argentina and Ecuador, even obtaining a papal dispensation to continue dressing in men’s clothes. Although the texts recounting her story are hard to corroborate, her life is sufficient for Las Hijas de Felipe to “flirt with strategic anachronism; in other words, appropriate the past to rethink the present”.