OFLUXO

“Bestiario de Lengüitas” (Bestiary of Tonguelets) is an evolving project by artist Mercedes Azpilicueta, in dialogue with curator Virginie Bobin. The exhibition follows the thread of a script written by Mercedes Azpilicueta for a performance that has yet to take place. Fueled by workshops, collaborations and rehearsals with artists, researchers, designers, dancers and singers, the works on view invite a choir of grotesque characters to loudly inhabit the stage of that future performance. Using obsolete knowledge systems, “neo-barroso” poems, failed translations and ambiguous ingredients, they try to maintain chaos and excess in a world calling for order, efficiency and transparency.

CAC Brétigny presents the final chapter in a series of three exhibitions, which previously took place at CentroCentro (Madrid, 2019) and Museion—Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Bozen/Bolzano (Italy, 2020), before returning to Île-de-France, where the project began in 2017 during a residency at Villa Vassilieff—Pernod Ricard Fellowship. In each location, Mercedes Azpilicueta conducted research and conversations with local interlocutors, which resonate in the works on view. Drawings, costumes, embroideries, videos, sound pieces and sculptures can be approached as scores, prototypes, décors, encoded knowledge systems or even characters responding to each other, rather than as autonomous artworks. They are windows into a work-in-progress that proliferates through multiple encounters, friendships and affections.

“Bestiario de Lengüitas” finds inspiration in proto-scientific knowledge devices, blending European medieval imaginaries with Latin American cosmogonies; and bringing together witches, goddesses and muses from both sides of the Atlantic. The protagonists (be they living or dead; existing or fictive; humans, protheses, animals, demons or plants) converse in a polyphony of languages and voices that obfuscate straight narratives. “Bestiario de Lengüitas” invites the viewers into a “New World Baroque”[1] kind of movement that favors instability and proliferation over the quest for a single truth.

The main collaborators to the project include: Lucile Sauzet (costumes), Ana Ausín (furniture) and Vanina Scolavino (graphic design), as well as Laura Fernández Antolín (production assistance), Federico García Monfort (sound), Hélène Harder (film), Julien Jassaud (computer programming and robotics), Emmanuelle Lafon (performance), Quiela Nuc (film), Ana Roquero (research), Pauline Simon (performance), Javier Villa (research and performance), Tiago Worm Tirone (sound), students from the Master’s in Artistic and Cultural Projects and World Scenes (Paris 8 University) and the Master’s in Performing Arts and Visual Culture (University of Castilla—La Mancha and Museo Reina Sofía); and participants in different choral schools in Madrid.