Miguel Benlloch (Loja, 1954 – Seville, 2018) was a performance artist, poet, and political and cultural activist. During the 1970s and 1980s he was active in the Communist Movement of Andalusia (MCA) and promoted the creation of the Gay Liberation Front of Granada (FLGG) and the Homosexual Liberation Front of Andalusia (FLHA). In 1983 he founded, together with Juan Antonio Peinado and Marino Martín, the venue Planta Baja in Granada. From 1986 to 1994 he was a member of the group CUTRE CHOU, participating in its occasional cabaret performances. From 2001 to 2015 he coordinated and produced, with the team of BNV Producciones, the program arteypensamiento at the International University of Andalusia (UNIA) in Seville, and coordinated or co-directed the Seminars of the Post-Identitarian Feminisms Archive.
Miguel Benlloch generally carried out his actions in direct relation to the context in which he was invited to participate. He generated discourses on the construction of identity through the use of clothing that belonged both to the sphere of his individuality and to workwear that pointed to collective spaces of production, functioning as discursive prostheses. The ritual conception underlying the processes of his actions delineated a transcendent territory from which symbols emerged that related to the viewer and produced knowledge. His belief that repetition is a constitutive part of ritual conceived identity as a cultural construction and therefore deconstructible and re-ritualizable, in a state of constant transition and reflection. The construction of gender, the construction of spaces, lighting as dazzling revelation, and the formation of subjectivity within collective geographies are recurring elements in his actions, in which music and dance precede the voice.
His performances/actions and works have been presented in spaces such as The Kitchen (New York), Arteleku (Donostia/San Sebastián), the Andalusian Centre for Contemporary Art (Seville), the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (Barcelona), the Picasso Museum (Barcelona), Ex Teresa Arte Actual (Mexico City), the National Museum of Art and the Museum of Ethnography and Folklore (La Paz), Tabakalera – International Centre for Contemporary Culture (Donostia/San Sebastián), Moderna Museet (Stockholm), the Centre for Contemporary Creation of Andalusia (Córdoba), Sala Atín Aya (Seville), CentroCentro (Madrid), Hospital Real (Granada), the Institut Valencià d’Art Modern (Valencia), the Van Abbemuseum (Eindhoven), Villa Arson (Nice), Centre d’Arts Santa Mònica (Barcelona), and the Andalusian Centre for Contemporary Art (Seville). Some of his works are held in the collections of the Institut Valencià d’Art Modern, the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, and the Andalusian Centre for Contemporary Art (Seville), among others.
The Miguel Benlloch Archive helps keep his creative legacy alive, enabling the reading and understanding of the development of art and aesthetic, political, and social activism in Spain at the turn of the century—a period that placed at the center of its discourses the debate on and the questioning of binary and heterocentered categories.
