Pérez y Requena: A Parrot, Three Bars, and Gold Teeth

Pérez y Requena explore overlooked dimensions of the city – particularly their native Santa Cruz de Tenerife and the Canary Islands archipelago – treating it as a restless, fragmentary archive of memory, territory, fiction and visual culture. Their methodology intertwines research and production, forging connections between sculpture and drawing, urban drift and installation.

The exhibition “A Parrot, Three Bars, and Gold Teeth” brings together sixteen new works that examine these minor forms of heritage rooted in decades of dérives, rumours, documentary traces, and archival research centred on the area now occupied by the TEA museum, along the Santos ravine, a territory that once imagined its future differently. The site was associated with travelling shows, bars and clandestine encounters before being reshaped by urban regeneration. Bringing together real places, the ghosts of a displaced imagination, and ways of life that have gradually been erased, the exhibition offers one possible reading of these long-term transformations.

The materials, techniques, and images brought together in the exhibition – including discarded photographs, architectural echoes and obsolete patterns – function as vignettes and residual fragments that evoke other times and geographies. Through strategies of copying, erasure, montage, distortion and annotation, these compositions do not seek to illustrate or fix meaning but rather to render absence perceptible.

Drawing mediates between experience and knowledge, introducing formal tensions and revealing what remains inscribed at the margins. What appears in the exhibition emerges from the friction between straight and sinuous lines, between memory and time, whose continual interplay shapes and transforms recurring ideas, desires, and nightmares.

A fully illustrated publication designed by Nicolás Barreto, to be released in fall 2026, will feature two new essays by the curators (Néstor Delgado Morales, Curator of Temporary Exhibitions at TEA, and Latitudes), archival material from the artists, and photographic documentation of the show.