'Un loro, tres bares y dientes de oro' is on display at TEA Tenerife Espacio de las Artes until 18 October in Sala C on the ground floor. The exhibition was curated by Latitudes and Néstor Delgado Morales. It is open from 10.00 to 20.00 on Tuesdays to Sundays and on public holidays; the venue is closed on Mondays.
Israel Pérez and María Requena approach Santa Cruz de Tenerife as a restless, fragmented archive shaped by memory, territory, fiction and visual culture. Their work is based on years of explorations, research and traces gathered from the area surrounding today's TEA. In doing so, they combine research and artistic production, establishing connections between sculpture and drawing, urban wandering and installation.
The focus is on the area where the museum stands today. The site was once associated with travelling shows, bars and clandestine encounters, and was later radically transformed by urban regeneration. The exhibition condenses these lengthy processes without turning them into a self-contained narrative. Instead, it works with partial views, remnants and references to vanished ways of life and urban uses.
The materials on display include, amongst other things, discarded photographs, architectural echoes, obsolete patterns and archive material. Examples include the black-and-white photograph “Elefantes” from 1996, “Nancy” from 2018, a documentary shot taken after the demolition of the El Dorado bar on the corner of Miraflores and San Francisco de Paula, and photographs of the murals inside the Niágara bar. Through copying, reworking, montage, distortion and annotation, the works primarily make absences perceptible.