Period
since 2013
Proposed by
Julia Morandeira Arrizabalaga
Location
Barcelona
About the project
At El Palomar, desire is a catalyst to rethink everything.
El Palomar was founded in 2013 by the artist duo Ama Sánchez and Rafa Marcos. That same year, they opened a 30 m² studio in Barcelona’s Poble-sec district as a space for exhibitions and events. Over the following three years, this modest attic space evolved into a pioneering and multifaceted art project dedicated to catalysing artistic production, rethinking institutional structures, and researching and recovering queer histories.
Between 2013 and 2017, the physical space functioned as a generative nucleus for queer and transdisciplinary experimentation. When the headquarters closed in 2017, the collective itself did not dissolve; instead, it transitioned into a nomadic model focused on research, production, and curatorial collaborations within larger institutions.
A significant early project, No es homosexual simplemente el homófilo sino el cegado por el falo perdido (2016), traversed narcissism, blasphemy, miscegenation, transvestism, and the murder of Pier Paolo Pasolini. The video was based on an unfinished 1976 script by Alberto Cardín, a leading LGBT writer and activist during Spain’s transition to democracy.
In 2015, Fons, armari i figura per Ismael Smith re-read the work of Barcelona-born artist Ismael Smith, who died in a US mental hospital in 1976, foregrounding questions of exile, marginalisation, and queer erasure.
In 2020, Schreber is a Woman draws upon the case study and memoirs of Daniel Paul Schreber, a 19th-century German judge who experienced confinement in a mental asylum and reported feelings associated with gender identity.
From 2022, Museo de las locas (Museum of the Madwomen/Queers) is an installation dedicated to the recovery and construction of trans and non-binary memory. It consists of a large-scale visual wall saturated with hand-produced screen prints of deceased queer icons.
El Palomar is an art project focused on the investigation, recovery, and production of queer memories to revise the hidden history of gender politics. El Palomar is a working community, an ideological alignment and an institutional reassessment.
External links
About the artist
The duo has developed an extensive institutional presence under the collective name El Palomar. They presented solo exhibitions at Fundació Joan Miró (Espai 13, 2016) and La Capella (2016), and performed at Haus der Kulturen der Welt (2017) and CentroCentro (2017). Their curatorial project Principios de refinamiento was presented at Casal Solleric in 2018. In 2020, they participated in the 11th Berlin Biennale with the work Schreber is a Woman, and the same year, they received the Ojo Crítico Award for Visual Arts. More recently, El Palomar has continued to operate as a mobile collective, presenting projects at MACBA, including Museo de las locas (live) (2024), and staging the solo exhibition PALABRA DE LOCA at Espace Big Bang (2025). Across these contexts, their work consistently engages with queer historiography, institutional critique, and the reactivation of dissident cultural memory.
