There are preconceived ideas that you often have to take off your shoes at the museum entrance. For example: that an exhibition has to be finite, measurable and palpable. The opposite often happens, that what we see, hear and feel can transcend material boundaries and flow like oil, with that same soft and liquid resistance, covering an unpredictable and permeable terrain throughout the museum’s interiors. Coming across that oily terrain can only be celebrated. This imaginary space is one of the few capable of transforming our environment and giving us, at once, infinite possibilities when it comes to imagining the world. Or what is the same: a flight forward.
There may also be irrational logic there. And that’s fine. Out with prejudices there too! Sometimes progress is made by going backwards or by invoking a future scenario, in the same way that immensity can be heard and the ear can reach vision. That other logical, neither rational nor reasonable, we find it in Córdoba, in the rooms of the C3A, which hosts the exhibition The dancing tablesby the Argentine artist (La Plata, 1981). Curated by Verónica Rossi accompanied by Jimena Blázquez, director of the CAAC, my journey goes from less to more: somewhat skeptical at first, and then dedicated. The same thing happens when thinking about tarot. Magic, mysticism, alchemy or the occult have long been installed in the internal forums of art to name that “magical contemporary” capable of illuminating the uncertain and chaotic of times. A dissonant but generative chorus of voices, hesitant yet effective, with which to imagine different ways of inhabiting the earth and relating to it.
RAFAEL CARMONA
This exhibition is also full of mysteries and lyricism, and invites us to think about the modes of creation, the sources of inspiration and the difference between the voluntary, the automatic and the revealed. In fact, all the works could be thought of as talismans, spells, rituals, scores, rehearsals, sets, prototypes, or imaginary characters speaking to each other. There are especially interesting dialogues, such as the one between a painting on a lamp attached to a pair of pants (magnetic spider2024) together with a shoe full of ears (Homenaje a Ithell2024), generates a fictional space where ideas enter and leave without distances. Other dialogues, however, remain in an unfinished dance like the stars escaping from a shoe, a guitar or a hat suspended from the museum ceiling. There is something literal and baroque in the gesture that doesn’t quite fit. Council from beyond the grave. Although these imbalances are the least. The objects seem to come to life and proliferate without leaving their place. The interiors also multiply and flee towards the exterior. Behold there The collective strength (2024): a table full of plaster hands ready to run away. To where? The dance of the dead? They would say yes.
It happens in other Azpilicueta exhibitions: they are usually drawn from the game. Magical realism, that term as Europeanizing as it is rooted in Latin American fantastic literature, is the part of the leg that supports those tables that seem to fall, rise or fade. They invoke, like many of the artist’s works, a character, in this case (1835-1909), the most charismatic popularizer of the spiritualist movement in the Hispanic world. The choice for the Andalusian psychic goes beyond geography, although it is still a nice gesture of rescue from the museum. Amalia was a very unusual woman in her time and she handled herself like few others at that time. other logic that challenged established norms and social conventions.
Linked to free thought, Freemasonry and the defense of secular education, she founded and directed a magazine for almost twenty years in which other like-minded women, such as Emilia Pardo Bazán and Carmen de Burgos, signed. When in September 1853, Madame de Girardin, a fan of the tables that were called “revolving” in Paris, introduced her to the bug of writing conversations with famous spirits, Amalia Domingo was already a twenty-something popular around the tables that talk and a voracious writer.
The artist remembers that spiritualism became an emancipatory movement for women artists who were limited by the patriarchal norms of the time.
Her writings are the artist’s starting point to wander between two worlds, revealing how spiritualism became an emancipatory movement for women artists who were limited by the patriarchal norms of the time. It is not the first work in which Azpilicueta rescues figures of undisciplined women. As in Popes, riots and other imaginaries (2021), interweaves the struggles of various movements of workers and the defense of women’s rights, today more important than ever. From this thread of demands appears embroidery and weaving, which have become a favorite medium for the artist’s research and which embrace her best works, such as the one that gives the exhibition its title. Also the idea of collaboration that the artist puts into practice through multiple encounters, friendships and affections.
Faced with the logic of inventing something new, Azpilicueta returns to the same things over and over again. That is their position: that of promoting a multidirectional, circular and porous positive contamination of stories. That of being assertive, but constantly allowing yourself to doubt. That of thinking of an exhibition as a place full of lines of flight. That of not seeking a single truth, nor covering one meaning with another. That of sustaining over time that radical alterity increasingly claimed by the museum. That of maintaining the beginner’s mind despite not being new or novel. His work is also now exhibited in several collectives: Unravel (in Amsterdam), Take a Breath (at the Irish Museum in Dublin) and Normopathies (in Es Baluard, in Palma de Mallorca). Theirs is a regulated disorder or what is the same: a chaos with approaches. A clumsy bestiary — “dirty,” she would say — that invites us to unlearn our skills and negotiate with our knowledge. Is there a better definition of exposure than that oil swamp?
‘Mercedes Azpilicueta. The dancing tables’. C3A. Cordova. Until March 9, 2025.
