Carolina Graeff-Martinez

by Franziska Jürgens

„I don’t have a feeling for rhythm, but I wear a straitjacket in a plastic shopping bag together with my rage and the dead way of life of the 70’s.“

The mood in Caro’s prose is so dense it can be cut with a knife. So dense you sometimes forget to take a breath. Either because you, full of tension and disgust, anticipate the main character’s next move or simply because your windpipe is completely constricted.  Caro goes where it hurts the most. We are dealing with violence, revenge fantasies, bodily fluids, with the patriarchy and linking arms with your female friends just to avoid the advances of some bloke.

Is this still punk rock?

Caro’s work exists in a cosmos where Kathy Acker and the music of Against Me! make their home together with voicelessness and anxiety and rage; the kind of rage that you have to keep inside. The dirty, repulsive kind that is maybe a tad bit melancholic at first sight, which sucks you into a vortex that is hard to get out of. It does not matter whether you read her prose, hear somebody read it or whether you enter a mens‘ toilet Caro has turned into her exhibition space.

Next to confinement, aversion, there are also the summer streets of Madrid which bear resemblance to holiday souvenirs. But you could not stray further from the truth, you seem to have only taken a superficial glance. Here Caro demonstrates what her critical eye is able to do, her stinging stare with which she looks at the world, looks at you. She asks questions about the era of Spanish fascism as well as her own biography and leaves you speechless and breathless – again and again.