Mercedes Azpilicueta's Tapestries Weave Unstable Histories
Mercedes Azpilicueta's jacquard tapestries explore the instability of historical facts, focusing on figures like Catalina de Erauso, the Lieutenant Nun, whose life is narrated in a four-metre-long tapestry. Azpilicueta is among South American artists using archival imagery to question history's construction. The article discusses how historians rely on documents from a literate minority, leaving gaps for creative methods like Saidiya Hartman's 'critical fabulation'. Other artists, including Dalton Paula and Shannon Alonzo, recover forgotten lives. Jamie Crewe's video 'Adulteress' adapts Rachilde's novel 'Monsieur Vénus', while Jordy Rosenberg's novel 'Confessions of the Fox' imagines librarians altering historical manuscripts. Azpilicueta's tapestries, with their messy backs, embrace epistemological uncertainty rather than simplifying Erauso's life. The piece warns against overwriting documents that reveal oppression. Kit Heyam's book 'Before We Were Trans' calls for space for ambiguous histories. Azpilicueta's use of the jacquard loom highlights history as manufactured, allowing for reweaving.
Key facts
- Mercedes Azpilicueta creates jacquard tapestries tracing the 16th-century conquest of the Americas.
- The tapestry 'The Lieutenant-Nun Is Passing: An Autobiography of Katalina, Antonio, Alonso, and More' (2021) is four metres long.
- Catalina de Erauso escaped a convent in San Sebastián in 1600, disguised as a boy, and lived as a man in the Americas.
- Erauso's memoir blends biography with fiction and was published centuries after it was written.
- Saidiya Hartman developed 'critical fabulation' to narrate lives of Black women from trial transcripts and prison files.
- Dalton Paula portrays Black Brazilians never visually represented; Shannon Alonzo uses archive photographs as 'portals'.
- Jamie Crewe's video 'Adulteress' (2017) adapts Rachilde's novel 'Monsieur Vénus' (1884).
- Jordy Rosenberg's novel 'Confessions of the Fox' (2018) imagines librarians altering historical manuscripts.
- Kit Heyam's book 'Before We Were Trans' (2022) critiques narrow criteria for trans history.
- Azpilicueta's tapestries have messy backs with knots and tangles, embracing convolution.
Entities
Artists
- Mercedes Azpilicueta
- Catalina de Erauso
- Gê Viana
- Laíza Ferreira
- Saidiya Hartman
- Dalton Paula
- Shannon Alonzo
- Jamie Crewe
- Rachilde
- Jordy Rosenberg
- Kit Heyam
- Izabella Scott
- Huw Lemmey
- Ben Miller
- Natalie Zemon Davis
Institutions
- ArtReview
Locations
- Americas
- San Sebastián
- Spain
- United States
- Brazil
- Trinidad and Tobago
- London
- England