Mercedes Azpilicueta
The Captive: Here’s a Heart for Every Fate, 2019Jacquard Textile (wool and cotton)157 × 300 cm (61 13⁄16 × 118 1⁄8 inches)
Mercedes Azpilicueta inquires into the social structures that shape our behavior and modes of expression, and then disassembles them with the expressiveness of her body, sound pieces and installations.
'The Captive' refers to the story of Lucia Miranda, a European woman who was captured in the 16th century by the Argentinian indigenous population and who literature transformed into the stereotype of the white captive by indigenous people, giving rise to a scriptural and discursive cycle whose scope goes much further then the canonical expressions of the nineteenth century, turning the Captive into “the body of the homeland” in Argentina.
Mercedes Azpilicueta evokes with this work a Baroque viscerality that is no longer just European, but also Colonial, and even Postmodern; a movement that Azpilicueta understands as a transhistorical force, or an expressive drive that inflames language, meaning and aesthetic forms.
