Mercedes Azpilicueta

Photo: Marcel de Buck, Archives van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, The Netherlands

Mercedes Azpilicueta (b. 1981, La Plata, Argentina) is a visual and performance artist living and working in Amsterdam and Buenos Aires. Her artistic practice brings together various characters from the past and the present, who manifest as voices, shapes, texts, traces, and memories into her multi-layered works. Calling herself a “dishonest researcher,” Azpilicueta navigates through multiple references and fields of knowledge, from art history to popular music, literature to street culture, falling in love with dissident figures and trajectories — feminist, queer, migrant, exiled individuals — who haunt her scripts, performances, and videos. Yet, her work never indulges into cold reverence or archival fascination. By engaging the body with all its flaws and potentials — her own body, that of her muses and collaborators, that of the spectators, but also fantasized ones — Azpilicueta embraces its fragility as well as its capacity for resistance and care.