Mercedes Azpilicueta (La Plata, Argentina, 1981) lives and works in Amsterdam and Buenos Aires. For her exhibition at Galerie Fons Welters, Azpilicueta shows costume sculptures and a video from a recent series of works called The Captive: Here’s a Heart for Every Fate.
Azpilicueta draws inspiration from the Baroque, a movement that has played an important role in her practice in recent years. The idea of excess and the layering of multiple narratives without a single truth appeals to her. Language and literature are always connected in her practice. From these interests Azpilicueta arrived at the neo-Baroque of nineteenth-century Latin America. In a transition period from colony to republic, the Baroque was reinterpreted there as a way to reinvent yourself and the other, and define different cultures and identities. Azpilicueta looked at which figures were relevant at the time and came across the legend of the cautiva Lucía Miranda, as told by Eduarda Mansilla (1834-1892). The story is in line with Azpilicueta’s interest in historical figures, especially muses not included in general historiography. Miranda was the first European woman to be captured by the indigenous people upon arrival in Argentina in the sixteenth century. In this nineteenth-century narrative of the story of Miranda, Mansilla emphasizes the strength of both the resistance Miranda and the indigenous people.
In the video The Fast Gossiper, a silver teapot in the shape of a nandoe, a native Latin American animal, tells the story of Eduarda Mansilla. This teapot is used in Latin America to drink maté tea, with which Azpilicueta mocks the limiting idea of housewives gossiping over tea.
For the sculptures in the exhibition, Azpilicueta looked into nineteenth-century fashion, which revolved around restraining and distorting the female body. The silhouette was manipulated and transformed by corsets and wigs, which she refers to in the costume sculptures in The Captive. The tension that the sculptures contain is juxtaposed by using soft, natural materials. The tense and at the same time sensual costume sculptures become theatrical characters in the space. In their ambiguity, they refer back to the limitations of women in the past, while at the same time instigating the desired freedom for the present and the future.
