El Palomar: Schreber is a Woman Opening

Date: July 14th
Time: 7:00 - 9:30
Location: Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art

Join us for the Opening Celebration of Schreber is a Woman, a video installation by the Spanish artist collective El Palomar (Mariokissme and R. Marcos Mota).

Schreber is a Woman, a video installation by the Spanish artist collective El Palomar (Mariokissme and R. Marcos Mota), is a meditation on queer and trans history through the figure of Daniel Paul Schreber (1842–1911), a German judge committed to a psychiatric institution in 1894. While in confinement, Schreber experienced visions and heard voices as he reflected on cosmology, sexuality, religion, and a consuming desire for gender transformation, believing it to be divinely orchestrated.

Through performance, set construction, and an electronic, dance-inflected soundtrack, El Palomar presents a contemporary envisioning of Schreber’s rich inner world from a transfeminist perspective. Bodies kaleidoscopically morph, double, and mirror one another in a parodic deconstruction of Freudian interpretations and the gender binaries upon which they rest. Excerpts from Schreber’s book Memoirs of My Nervous Illness (1903) are narrated throughout the piece and invoked in lyrics (one song repeats “No estoy loca,” a cry of resistance against the pathologizing narratives of the clinic which still resonate today). Made during the social isolation of the early Covid-19 pandemic, the installation recuperates, for our present moment, the historic struggles for bodily autonomy, self-determination, and joy.

El Palomar will be in conversation followed by a listening session of their new work!

Light refreshments served.

Image Details: Schreber is a Woman. Still frame, 2020. Courtesy of El Palomar.

Image Description: A figure with long hair is bathed in red light amidst a flat red background. They are shown from the waist up, gazing at the viewer, and with fingernails larger than their head covering their face.