"To see a world in a grain of sand,
And a heaven in a wildflower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour."
William Blake, ¿The Auguries of Innocence¿ (1863)

Going and coming in trance: a hypnosis that allows access to other forms of communication, facilitating the dissolution between the conscious and the unconscious, between life and death. In the 19th century, Spiritualism emerged, situated between Christianity and psychoanalysis, as a possibility for reconnection between the earthly realm and that of spirits. This movement not only opened new doors to the imaginary but also provided many women writers and artists with a space of freedom to transcend the limitations imposed by traditional society. Victor Hugo, in his work The Jersey Turntables (1850), documented his spiritualist experiences during his exile, describing how tables "danced" in mediumistic sessions, offering the possibility of contact with beings from other worlds. This practice allowed him to explore his own unconscious and reflected the emancipatory power of Spiritualism, particularly for women, who found in these experiences a creative and communicative avenue beyond patriarchal structures.

In The Dancing Tables, an unprecedented exhibition at C3A in Córdoba, Mercedes Azpilicueta (La Plata, Argentina, 1981) explores the creative space that emerges through Spiritualism, reconstructing the life of Amalia Domingo Soler (Sevilla, 1835 ¿ Barcelona, 1909), the most charismatic promoter of the spiritualist movement in the Spanish-speaking world and a precursor of gender equality. Domingo Soler dedicated her life to advocating for a more just and equitable society, expressing her ideals through numerous publications. In this exhibition, some of her writings, present in their first editions, serve as a starting point to wander between two worlds, revealing how Spiritualism became an emancipatory movement for women artists who faced severe limitations due to the patriarchal norms of the time. As Jennifer Higgie notes in her book The Other Side: A Journey into Women, Art, and the Spirit World (2023), "Spiritualism offered women a space where they could explore and express ideas beyond social conventions, creating art that challenged established norms and channeled the spiritual."

Azpilicueta finds in the uniqueness of Domingo Soler¿s texts a reflection of her own concerns, establishing a cosmic dance of shared experiences that summarize the idea of migration: between arts and letters, between cities and countries, between the real and the spiritual, between reason and mystical, healing dreams, between then and now, bringing us closer to a new tower of knowledge.

Since 2015, Mercedes Azpilicueta has positioned her practice as a form of historiographic intervention, based on multidisciplinarity. Through fluid and associative connections, she counters the rigid narratives of history, making way for the emergence of affective and dissenting voices, recovering in the archives latent resonances of a possible future. On this occasion, she presents an enveloping and constantly transmuting performative and sculptural installation. The exhibition space simulates a time-suspended environment, unsettling, where characters converge among the remnants of dysfunctional furniture. It is a space that resonates with the interiority of the mind, oscillating between refuge and hostility. As Victor Hugo stated in Contemplations (1856): "The visible is made of the invisible."

In the universe created by the Argentine artist for the T3 room of the C3A, spectral characters inspired by the protagonists of Amalia Domingo Soler¿s books wander¿inhuman and unsettling beings. The viewer enters a world where the boundary between the real and the dreamlike, between the material and the spiritual, blurs through a play of lights and shadows. The tables seem to dance to the rhythm of a sound installation that envelops the entire exhibition space, suggesting performative gestures oscillating between the choreography of the invisible and the spontaneous. Three-dimensional sculptures, dressed in typical Córdoba attire, tables suspended in space, textile elements, and walls adorned with a series of drawings made by the artist specifically for this exhibition create an atmosphere where shadows gradually reveal themselves, causing the viewer to lose the sense of reality and immerse under the influence of invisible forces in a universe that transcends the tangible. This exhibition becomes an immersive experience, where perception is not limited to sight but involves all the senses, allowing for a visualization of the ethereal and the spiritual, reminding us how art can make the invisible visible, just as Victor Hugo attempted with his turntables.

Azpilicueta creates imaginary characters that wander in an uninterrupted ebb and flow between times, between dreams and nightmares; between the limits of language and the expressive potential of the image, in a ghostly room that escapes all control exerted by reason. Cavernous sounds, evoking communications with ethereal and ghostly characters from the books of Amalia Domingo Soler, immerse the visitor in an imagined and otherworldly space, where stories converge that appeal to the political place of the spiritualist movement. The interpretive and predictive work carried out by women required a strong degree of intuition and sensitivity to everything that remains invisible to the eyes. In this case, Domingo Soler, nearly blind to the earthly world, possessed a vision that transcended life.

The web of works by Mercedes Azpilicueta in The Dancing Tables invites a journey through textures, images, cavernous sounds, and scents, where the real and the spiritualist collapse their boundaries. The Dancing Tables dismantle the idea of reality as a refuge of the secure and stable; and reason, which migrates at times to the inexplicable, loses its place as the final bastion, leaving us exposed to a wandering drift.

Curators: Verónica Rossi & Jimena Blázquez Abascal
Verónica Rossi is a curator at the Museum of Latin American Art in Buenos Aires.
Dr. Jimena Blázquez Abascal is the director of CAAC / C3A.
This exhibition has been made possible with the collaboration of the Mondriaan Fund in Amsterdam.

Biography:

Mercedes Azpilicueta (La Plata, Argentina, 1981) is a visual and performance artist from Buenos Aires who lives and works in Amsterdam. Her artistic practice brings together various characters from the past and present, manifesting as voices, forms, texts, traces, and memories in her multilayered works. Azpilicueta, who defines herself as a ¿dishonest researcher,¿ navigates multiple references and fields of knowledge, from art history to popular music, from literature to street culture, falling in love with figures and trajectories that are dissenting¿feminist, queer, migrant, exiled¿that roam her scripts, performances, and videos. However, her work is never swayed by cold reverence or archival fascination. By addressing the body with all its flaws and potentials¿her own body, that of her muses and collaborators, that of the viewers, but also those imagined¿Azpilicueta embraces its fragility, as well as its capacity for care and resilience.

She was an artist-in-residence at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten, Amsterdam, in 2015¿16, and received the Pernod Ricard Fellowship in 2017. Her solo exhibitions include Kunstverein Göttingen (2023); Sammlung Philara, Düsseldorf (2022); Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein, Vaduz (2022); Gasworks, London (2021); CAC Brétigny, Brétigny-sur-Orge (2021); Museion, Bolzano/Bozen (2020); Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven (2019); Centro-Centro, Madrid (2019); Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires (2018); and Móvil, Buenos Aires (2015).

Azpilicueta was nominated for the Prix de Rome 2021.

· Download Press Release here

· Download High Resolution Images here

· Download Gallery Sheet Here.