Pride month 2025: El drag es político

The Spanish Cultural Center marks Pride 2025 with Cabello/Carceller’s “El Drag es Político,” a bold banner showing Spain’s commitment to LGBTQI+ rights and visibility.

In celebration of Pride Month 2025, the Spanish Cultural Center features the work of artist duo Cabello/Carceller, who have created a panel under the slogan, El Drag Es Político. This piece is a reinterpretation of a previous work by the artists, redesigned and adapted specifically for this space.

The banner, displayed in the front garden of the Beaux-Arts mansion, symbolizes Spain’s firm commitment to LGTBIQ+ rights and its active involvement in Pride Month 2025. This year’s celebration is especially meaningful, as Washington, D.C. hosts World Pride 2025.

During our participation in the 56th Venice Biennale 2015, one of the rooms of the Spanish pavilion was occupied by a banner that read: El Drag Es Político (Drag Is Political). On a background of flowers, letters apparently improvised in silver adhesive tape composed the phrase, building a canvas in which the strength of the colors and the brightness of the letters led to a space in which the political appeared to meet the rave. On that occasion, the supposedly banal flash of drag and masquerade revealed a dissident subtext.

In 2025, and in a context that is even more violent towards non-conforming sexualities, we take up the phrase again in a proposal in which the words act as a sparkle in the fog, imposing their luminosity and their presence against those who wish to destroy it by making it disappear. Based on an image from our project Futuro: Itinerario (2001), in which we suggest the foggy landscape as a space of possibility, Drag is Political, today more than ever.

— Cabello/Carceller

World Pride Washington, D.C. 2025

The Cultural Office of the Spanish Embassy in Washington celebrates World Pride 2025 with a work by the Spanish art collective Cabello/Carceller, curated by feminist curator Semíramis González. Starting with a new installation in the Cultural Office space, a sentence visible from the street will be part of this Pride celebration, as a vindication of diversity and LGTBIQ+ visibility.

The artistic work of Cabello/Carceller, in their more than two decades of practice, has been driven by a commitment to sexual and gender diversity and by critical reflections on gender and its expressions. Words have also played a fundamental role in many of their works, such as the one featured in the Spanish Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2005.

Following this line of work, the sentence presented as an artistic installation, is placed in the outdoor space of the Spanish Cultural Center in Washington, D.C., as part of the worldwide celebration of World Pride 2025.

Cabello/Carceller

Cabello/Carceller (Paris, 1963 / Madrid, 1964) is an artist team formed in 1992. They live and work in Madrid (Spain), and currently teach at Cuenca Faculty of Fine Arts, UCLM University in Cuenca (Spain).

Starting their collaboration around the beginning of the nineties, Cabello/Carceller have developed an interdisciplinary work that uses different media —installation, performance, video, writing, drawing— to examine the hegemonic means of representation in visual practices, suggesting critical alternatives to them. From a conceptual, politically engaged approach, they use strategies such as appropriation or performance and fiction to question the modernist narratives that avoid minority politics while recurrently quoting them. Seeking to unveil these contradictions, they invite mainly amateur, but sometimes also professional collaborators who are to be confronted with unfamiliar, queer situations or texts.

Isolated and out of context, these protagonists experience an imbalance created among them, the narration, and the narrative structures on which they rely, frequently contributing to activate or expand their established meaning. As a collaborative work, these projects underline the importance of building or rewriting collective poetics from divergent positions, recalling the need to study interstitial and alternative experiences, revising sexual and gender politics, also when applied to space and architectural design, and questioning the prevalent narratives of conventional cinematic fiction through which neoliberal politics and their modes of social relation have been promoted.

Cabello/Carceller have been included in Art and Queer Culture, a major historical survey published by Phaidon Press and written by Catherine Lord and Richard Meyer. Their work is also featured in The Queer Art of Failure, written by Jack Halberstam and published by Duke University Press, as well as in the prologue to the Spanish edition of Female Masculinity (Masculinidad femenina) by the same author.

Collective shows

• Coreografias do impossível at the 35rd Bienal de São Paulo, Sao Paulo, Brasil.
• Acción. Una historia provisional de los 90, MACBA Barcelona.
• The Subjects, Spanish Pavilion at the 56th Venice Biennale, Italy.
• Global Feminisms, Brooklyn Museum, New York and Davis Museum, Wellesley College, Massachusetts, USA.
• Fiction and Reality, MMOMA, Moscow Museum of Modern Art, Moscow.
• BB4 Bucharest Biennale: On Producing Possibilities, Bucharest, Romania.
• Bienal Latinoamericana de Artes Visuales, Curitiba, Brasil.
• re.act feminism. A Performing Archive, Akademie der Künste, Berlin, and other European venues.
• Nuevas Historias. A New View of Spanish Photography and Video, Stenersen Museum, Oslo, Norway / Kuntsi Museum of Modern Art, Vaasa, Finland / Kulturhuset, Stockholm, Sweden / Royal Library, Denmark.
• Genealogías Feministas, MUSAC, León, Spain.
• The Screen Eye or The New Image, Casino Luxembourg, Luxembourg.
• Cooling Out, Lewis Glucksman Gallery, Cork, Ireland.
• En todas partes, CGAC, Santiago de Compostela, Spain.

Solo shows

Selected solo shows include A Voice for Erauso. Epilogue for a Trans Time at Azkuna Zentroa, Bilbao; A Film With No Intention. After Chantal Akerman at Elba Benítez Gallery, Madrid; I Am a Stranger, and I Am Moving at Joan Prats Gallery, Barcelona; Borrador para una exposición sin título at MUAC México, MARCO de Vigo and CA2M Madrid; Gender is Political. Regelbau 411, Denmark; Lost in Transition _un poema performativo at IVAM, Valencia; Rapear Filosofía: Foucault, Sontag, Butler, Mbembe, Elba Benítez Gallery, Madrid; MicroPolíticas, MicroPoéticas at Sala La Patriótica/CCEBA Buenos Aires, Argentina; Off Escena; Si yo fuera…, Abierto X Obras at Matadero Madrid, Spain; and Archivo: Drag Modelos, Joan Prats Gallery, Barcelona and CAAM, Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain or A/O (Caso Céspedes), CAAC Sevilla, Spain.