Moving along with Mercedes Azpilicueta’s art revolt

Her mother was the one who kept the household economy running, Azpilicueta explains. She was a social worker for 40 years, supporting young mothers, teenagers and children. When she divorced, Mercedes and her sister were still young. To make ends meet, her mother opened a clothing boutique from home. ‘Yes, she is a true entrepreneur,’ Azpilicueta says, taking a sip from her maté. ‘That was also a source of inspiration for me’. At the age of twelve, Mercedes was already working in the shop. She helped to select the fabrics: they sourced from local workshops, at a time before textile production was largely outsourced to Asia. ‘It felt good seeing my mother happy with what she did, it was inspiring,’ Azpilicueta recalls. ‘She felt pride in earning money for her family, for me and my sister.’

Photographs of the fashion shows in which Mercedes and her sister took part at school, wearing garments made in Argentina, can be found in Potatoes (…). ‘I was fifteen or sixteen, walking on the catwalk. She taught us how to walk and how to present ourselves. So both textile and performance were already present back then.’ It may have felt somewhat awkward at times, she admits. But walking in those fashion shows also gave her confidence. Azpilicueta: ‘It created a network of friends and mutual care. A kind of matriarchy.’

It also marked the beginning of the Ni Una Menos movement. Azpilicueta gets out of her chair and points to a green handkerchief hanging on the wall, bearing the name of the protest movement. ‘During my childhood in Argentina, women were constantly objectified. During the Covid pandemic in 2020, the abortion law had just been passed in Argentina. Even in the twenty-first century, we are still fighting for the right to decide what to do with our own bodies. The Dolle Mina’s are back. How is this possible? It feels as if we are still living in the 1930s or 1940s.’

Azpilicueta saw a parallel with the Potato Riots and contemporary protests, and wanted her work to reflect that. Fellow artist and friend Yael David played an important role in this. She also encouraged Azpilicueta to connect her personal experiences to the historical material. Azpilicueta: ‘Yael would say: ‘Wait a second, where are you in this story?’ I started looking at my own photo archive. What is my own relationship to textile? Weaving and tapestry-making both have a long tradition in Belgium and the Netherlands. But for me, being an artist, it is also important that you have a personal connection and history with the material. So that I can truly stand behind it.’

She often brings together multiple narratives in this way, drawing inspiration from writers such as Elena Garro, Marosa di Giorgio, Nestor Perlongher and other Latin American authors who might be described as neo-baroque. ‘I like it when something unexpected happens. And there must be room for humour, so that one might think: hey, what is this?’

Baroque and literature carry a particular significance in Latin America due to its colonial history, Azpilicueta explains. ‘Baroque was used as an aesthetic ideal to indoctrinate, conquer and colonise the American continents.’ She pauses – perhaps it would be better to use the term ‘Abya Yala’, the name used by Indigenous peoples for the continent. ‘What is striking: this strategy never worked and after two hundred years, the project was abandoned without success.’

In Europe, Baroque is an architectural style characterised by layering and multiplicity. In Latin America, it is distorted, a kind of ‘wrong Baroque’. Amused, the artist explains: ‘The churches in Peru, Bolivia or Argentina feature a Black Madonna or jungle animals, they are monstrous, strange. And I love that. Baroque in Latin America has multiple phases. It first appeared in the seventeenth century with the Spanish. Then, in the nineteenth century, we became independent from Spain and Portugal, and Baroque returned. It is a way of reclaiming an understanding of who we are. There was a mass killing, everything was erased, much was stolen. But Baroque keeps returning, like a failed modernist project.’

In the artwork, these different narratives intertwine. None is more important than another. As in Baroque, it can be dizzying and that is precisely the intention. In an interview, Azpilicueta explained that she always knew that moving to another continent would bring new languages, spaces, cultures and expectations. ‘And that was precisely what I was looking for: to live in that in-betweenness, allowing to see yourself in a multiple, fragmented and collective way.’

As part of her traditional training in painting, she was taught art history, aesthetics and Latin American history. At the same time, she places a strong emphasis on spatiality, as is also evident in Potatoes (…). She refers to this as ‘spatial dramaturgy’, as the work functions like a stage set that the audience can move around. Traditionally, tapestries have been status symbols and also served as a form of insulation. In this specific work, the viewer is required to move around it physically, to encounter it with the body. It cannot be grasped in a single glance or held in one’s hands. This is important to Azpilicueta. ‘Whenever I work with tapestry, I try to push the medium further. I’ve attached elements to it, people are allowed to touch it. By doing so, I also push against the boundaries of the contemporary textile industry – just like the women from the Jordaan during the Potato Riots.’ There is another reason as well. Female textile artists of the sixties and seventies are often associated with modesty– for them, it was about intimacy, shaping domestic forms, works that can be held and embraced. For Azpilicueta, it was important to make clear at the textile factory that she wanted to make a statement. She is a performance artist, and she created a large, monumentally loud work.

And yet the making of this work began on paper. Across two walls, she made a composition of the images: photographs of the canals, protests on bridges – bridges that protestors also blocked. Further, she incorporated references to Ni Una Menos and the Zapatista movement – the Mexican liberation struggle that played an important role during her student years. She also added photographs of herself, her sister and her mother attending protests.

What first stands out in the tapestry of Potatoes (…), is the sheer flood of photographs, drawings, social media screenshots and here and there handwritten, old-fashioned words used in Dutch such as boezelaar, lellebel and koffiepiksters. These fragments of images and words could be described as Azpilicueta’s building blocks. Not necessarily because of their literal meaning. She compares them to allegory in classical painting, in which human figures symbolise a broader, more abstract idea – think for instance of Lady Justice. For a long time, she primarily worked with performance and video, but the tapestries could not do without imagery. Azpilicueta retrieved these from archives and brought them into the open to tell their stories.

At the TextielLab, the professional workshop of the Textile Museum in Tilburg, she selected the palette and colours with master weaver Judith Peskens. Together, they determined the density of the threads, the level of detail in the image and what worked and what did not. Objects are arranged around the tapestry, some suggesting practical use as garments, aprons for instance, or as tools. During the Potato Riots, women wore aprons. People who perform manual labour often wear white uniforms, which is why Azpilicueta also made the aprons white.
Here, too, parallels emerged with her own experiences. When attending demonstrations in Latin America, preparation is key, she explains. You wear sneakers and bring water, some petty cash, snacks for on the road and a cap to shield oneself from the sun. All these items are usually carried in a small bag worn on the chest.
Azpilicueta deliberately made the aprons and other objects from very inexpensive materials. She knotted and crocheted them from the Albert Heijn supermarket vegetable bags, cleaning items such as dusters and the nozzles of whipped-cream dispensers: everyday items that are accessible on a limited budget.

For Azpilicueta, this work is about representing women’s labour. She states that the work of female artists is still taken less seriously than that of men. ‘It is more difficult for us to work, we make less money, we take care of our children and that labour remains invisible. We tend to take on more household responsibilities than men, no matter how hard we try to make things equal. All these thousands of years have been stored inside our bodies. We carry children in our bodies, which also has a huge impact on our lives.’ The unjust and unequal distribution of labour and rights continues to frustrate her. ‘We are in the twenty-first century, the world could look so much better. Instead, we are once again debating the banning of abortion.’

Without a sense of engagement, she says, she could not be an artist. This is something she learned from her parents, both of whom worked in care professions. Her mother as a social worker, her father as a paediatrician. Politics were rarely discussed explicitly at home, but there was a strong awareness of social responsibility. ‘It wasn’t about making money.’ And this is also what she seeks to pass on to her students: you have to take a stance. Artists have a voice and communicate this through their work. The danger, she argues, is that the art world becomes too isolated, speaking only to itself. That is why she is so pleased with her exhibition at De Appel, where she created work that children could play with, reaching a very different audience. This, too, is no coincidence, she emphasises: ‘The art world can be very elitist. I love talking about art, literature, surrealism, poetry, but we also need to have impact.’

That’s why she primarily sees herself as a materialist: goods and labour matter, and so do quantities. How many artists’ works do you acquire and how many of them are by women? She is concerned with how food is produced, like potatoes and other daily food. To another artist, she poses the question: where does your income come from? And what about the museum? Ethics are important to her, also in a practical manner: where do the materials come from? What are the working conditions behind the production of the work?

This is why she leaves the frayed edges and repairs visible in the tapestry. Because this is how women live and work: holding multiple jobs, constantly juggling time. Azpilicueta weaves together all these elements – historical and personal narratives, practical and literary dimensions into a new story. Because all of these histories deserve to be heard and seen. There is always time to sit still and remain silent. But not now.