Mercedes Azpilicueta
Soft Armour III (Micheline), 2018Wool cloth dyed with natural dyes, handmade natural latex, thread190 × 100 × 80 cm (74 13⁄16 × 39 3⁄8 × 31 1⁄2 inches)
Mercedes worked in close collaboration with French designer Lucile Sauzet to create a series of costumes and props, including soft armors, leather shelters, withered skins, eerie masks and latex tumours. They make up an ambivalent menagerie of bodies that hesitate between the living and the dead, the organic and the inorganic, the protective and the aggressive — as their title, Soft Armours, suggests. However, when we see the costumes come to life in the films, the way they grotesquely constrain the movements of the performers reveals their essential feature: humour — a quality that springs from most of Mercedes’ works.
Rather than inanimate pieces of clothing, the costumes appearing on the Stage should be considered as characters in their own right. Although they lack a recognizable body, they breathe through the movement of air. In Mercedes’ script, the protagonists are not necessarily human or alive as we know it. She thus invites us to question our anthropocentric perception of the world, and to imagine different ways of inhabiting it and relating to it.
