Activities, exhibitions and projects

Image: Mercedes Azpilicueta. Textile ssculpture 1. May 2024

From September 27, 2024, to March 2, 2025

This project, participated in by women, is conceived as a spatial dramaturgy mediating between worlds, based on the story of the Sevillian Amalia Domingo Soler.

Mercedes Azpilicueta reconstructs the life of the Andalusian writer, newspaper director, columnist, suffragist, and feminist Amalia Domingo Soler (Seville, 1835 - Barcelona, 1909), the most charismatic promoter of the spiritist movement. She talks about her publications and the silence that follows her death. She finds that the rarity of the books written by Amalia is also her own, abandoning herself then to the unconscious, and she takes refuge in that dark space between reason and dream. Her texts provide other visual and literary worlds in which the marvelous, utopian, mystical, and healing bring us closer to a new tower of knowledge.

She will make this female figure known, but she will also use the translation of the research on this woman to lead the public through the possibility of mediating between worlds. The exhibition will offer a sensory, almost theatrical experience, playing with the presence/absence of bodies (whether human or non-human bodies), voices, and stories, but also with the spectacular architecture of the C3A.

The fondness for spiritist soirées was common among writers and artists. It is likely that the case of the Surrealists is one of the most emblematic. Mediumship had one preeminent gender: the feminine, and countless women gained fame for these paranormal abilities.

The artist Mercedes Azpilicueta positions her practice as a form of historiographic intervention. In fluid and associative connections, she counters rigid historical narratives to make way for the emergence of affective and dissident voices. She retrieves latent resonances of a possible futility in the archives. In this case, she presents a performative and sculptural installation inspired by the work of the writer Amalia Domingo Soler. She finds in her synthetic and estranged books resonances of her own concerns, rediscovers in the traces that remain of Amalia's life shared experiences that sum up the idea of migration: between the arts and letters.

The proposal presents works that combine writing, the use of voice, drawing, textiles, embroidery, photography, and sketches of puppets and installations.

The title of the exhibition refers to Las mesas danzantes, the first book published in 1854 in Cádiz dedicated to spiritism.

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