María Salgado and Fran MM Cabeza de Vaca

Jockey Last Kingdom Frag. 1 is a piece that explores the birth of bodily difference or “campness” before and during the process of acquiring the language, i.e., that moment in childhood prior to and simultaneous with entry into the symbolic order and the binary gender system, when everything is still possible because the subjectivity is still stuck to the skin, the tongue, the mouth, the needs, the urges. We want to speak about “campness” not just as a mannerism that stigmatises certain subjects as deviants from the gender norm (and its cast of gestures that characterise men and women) but as a singular variation of any body that appears in the world over the infinite possibilities of the human. We want to speak about the process of acquiring language as a strange and joyous moment, a pleasurable and downright crazy moment then the community teaches us how to speak, it teaches us to shape our mouths in a specific way to pronounce sounds whose meaning we do not yet understand, with a specific accent on which our campness will create its own variations. The community quality of language is that continuity of the human from which we come and into which we gradually enter as we come and go and enter into a world full of non-human sounds which are at times indistinguishable from our crying or moaning or stammering (the wind, the water, the branches). It is this process of contiguity and differentiation of ourselves with the world and in the world that constitutes us as subjects that we wish to address in our work, even though we are starting off with an added difficulty (which is an opportunity): that we forget all about it. We forget that at some time or other we learned how to speak, we forget that at some time or other someone taught us to speak, but even so, that language that we learnt remains in our bodies, that singular vibration of our living material or our recorded campness. It is recorded but we have forgotten it. How do you remember something like that? How do you un-record it?

María Salgado (1984) and Fran MM Cabeza de Vaca (1976) have been working together in Madrid since 2012, based on the idea of audiotext as an intersection between poetry, language, sound art, music and performance art. The research area entitled Towards A Noise (Hacía un Ruido) (2012-2016), which focused on the cycle of political disobedience in 2011, gave rise to graphic self-published posters and pamphlets, a book, a record, an instrumental piece for an ensemble, an audio installation that lasted two months, and a hybrid recital that toured to such diverse places as Madrid, Nueva York, Barcelona, and Guadalajara (México). Jockey Last Kingdom (Jinete Último Reino) (2017-), the research area in which they are currently immersed, explores sexual and gender dissidence. Its origin lies in an instrumental piece and it was published as a score in the Present Tense Pamphlets collection. Related to that research area, they have also produced a sound piece for Radio Reina Sofía, posters (Manifiesto, 2018), scores and two 60-minute performance pieces: Fragment 3 and Fragment 2, which were premièred respectively at Matadero (Madrid, 2017) and MACBA (Barcelona, 2019). Both pieces have toured and continue to tour various theatres, museums and festivals. festivales.