Gabriela Landín was born in Galicia, northern Spain, in 1969—under Franco’s dictatorship, in Marin, a fishing and military village where repression lived in everyday life. As a child of the Spanish Transition, she came of age under the shadow of persecution: no longer jailed, but still hunted, harassed, and left unprotected just for being us.

At sixteen, she ran away to Madrid. There she encountered the hidden world of the clandestine gay bars that had survived fascist persecution and still thrived in the cracks of Spain’s democracy. There, she met the elders—gay and trans survivors who carried their dignity like a crown no regime could confiscate. They taught her the codes of survival, resistance, and subversion—the stories of enduring and fighting back against oppression and ignorance. Their legacy—her history—she refuses to let be erased or forgotten.

Soon she was part of La Movida—Madrid’s explosion of creativity and queerness—crossing paths with Almodóvar’s world and Chueca’s underground art scene. For two decades, she performed as a gender-defiant aerial artist, working with major artists like Monica Naranjo, Hansel Cereza, and Antonio Canales. Her body became her instrument for challenging everything they ever told her she could not be.

“Tell me I cannot and watch me do it.”

Now, after completing social transition and in the final step of her medical transition, she is ready to transition as an artist. Her ceramics, sculptures, and installations carry her history—exploring societal tensions and everlasting survival dialogues—visceral monologues of truth. Every piece is a refusal to be erased.

Nothing grandeurer perfect—never finished. As with art, so with life.