From Baudelaire to Lana del Rey, passing through Rimbaud, Patti Smith, Amy Winehouse, punk or Dada, the Romantic revolution is one of the main influences on the work of Roberta Marrero.
Poetry, collage, graphic novels and even musical sets from her time as a DJ that engage with the myths, poetics and politics of Romanticism. Symbolism, decadent maudit culture or dandyism are updated in her work from an autobiographical, travesti and queer "contemporary melancholy".
Like the Romantics, Marrero places the "self" at the centre of her work through her identity, her wounds, love and desire. But that "self" breaks apart and multiplies into the many voices it claims, dissolving between Eros and Thanatos, between the razor and the wound.
Marrero thus emerges, luminous and dark, through those fragments. Thefts from high culture and pop myths, the poetry of Pizarnik, Genet or Tom of Finland, from which she draws a multiple self-portrait in which subjectivity opposes social norms –like the outlaws, the pirates, the creatures of the dark or the Romantic spirits– to question gender norms, compulsory heterosexuality, the role of travestis and queer people in relationships of love and desire, or traditional models of beauty.
Raw and radical, ironic and camp, Marrero's gaze at culture –both the hegemonic and the minority– starts from the margins, from the place of the excluded. She does so without asking permission or forgiveness. Difference is not tragic in itself, but a form of resistance against true violence –that of the system, in every gesture, every look, every contempt– against the martyrs, those who live outside the maps, the precarious and the travesti women in love.
She was a visual artist, writer, poet and multidisciplinary creator from the Canary Islands, regarded as a leading figure of queer culture in Spain. Born in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria and died in Madrid, she developed a personal and transgressive body of work combining pop art, collage, literature, autobiography and LGTBIQ+ culture.
Her creative universe mixed icons of music and film, religious images, literary references and elements of popular culture to question social norms, models of beauty and conventions of gender and sexuality. As a trans woman, she also turned her own experience into a tool of expression, memory and vindication, giving visibility to dissident identities and to those historically relegated to the margins.
Her legacy is that of a creator who turned difference into artistic and political power, claiming the freedom to build one's own identity and to find refuge, beauty and resistance in pop culture, poetry and the shared experiences of the queer community.
© Ministerio de Cultura - Gobierno de España