Mercedes Azpilicueta: Bestiary of Tonguelets — FALL 2023

Bestiary of Tonguelets / Bestiario de Lengüitas is Mercedes Azpilicueta’s so-far biggest—evolving—project which began in 2017 in Paris, in dialogue with curator Virginie Bobin. It follows the thread of a script written for a performance that has yet to take place. Using local obsolete knowledge systems, “neobarroso” poems, failed translations and ambiguous ingredients, Bestiario de Lengüitas stages a choir of grotesque characters who try to maintain chaos and excess in a world calling for order, efficiency, and transparency. Mercedes Azpilicueta pays a tribute to “proto-scientific” knowledge primarily disseminated among women—such as midwives and witches—before religion, capitalism and modern medicine silenced them. The uncanny contaminations that occur
between plants and bodies were fed by several encounters in the streets of Paris, the Botanical garden of Madrid and the magical forests of Bolzano, thus generating—via storytelling, fables and the reactivation of ancient rituals—a new embodied cartography of knowledge that transpires through scripts, drawings and artworks.