Miguel Benlloch: Essays on Seediness

Curators: Alejandro Simón, Joaquín Vázquez and Mar Villaespesa

The exhibition brings together works by the performance artist, poet and political and cultural activist Miguel Benlloch (Loja, 1954–Seville, 2018) that are displayed in relation to other pieces presented by the artists Equipo re, Julio Jara, Guillermina Mongan, Álvaro Romero, María Salgado and Fran MM Cabeza de Vaca.

Benlloch’s actions, texts and political and aesthetic activities, which he produced under the collective umbrella and the vitality of the sociopolitical and artistic groups he was related to, coalesce into a singular space for reading and understanding the development of art and activism in turn-of-the-century Spain, which centred discourses on debating and questioning binary and heterocentric categories. His production represents an early critical view of identity, a thought issuing from the body and a writing that appears in the form of action, photograph, book, proclamation, speech or placard.

In the early 1980s, at the stall of the Communist Movement in the Corpus Christi festival in Granada, Benlloch took part in the organization of the Cutre Chou (“Seedy” or “Tacky Show”), a review of short performances that displayed some of the diverse feelings among this self-convened movement opposed to Franco’s dictatorship. The title of this exhibition, Ensayos sobre lo cutre (Essays on Seediness), pays tribute to a moment of condensation when political militants started to find expression with the voice and body, and to turn the “seedy” and “tacky” into a tool for dissent from the norm and disrespect for form.

Essays on Seediness: Readings of the Miguel Benlloch Archive has been opened up to the artists mentioned above, who are invited to read and study the archive with a view to creating and displaying works whose interlocution, correspondence or response to those of Benlloch generate new links and principles favouring the advance of transgressive and political artistic proposals.