Bestiary of Tonguelets / Bestiario de Lengüitas / Bestiaire de petites langues, 2024

The trilingual edition, Bestiary of Tonguelets / Bestiario de Lengüitas / Bestiare des petites langues is Mercedes Azpilicueta’s so-far most comprehensive—and still evolving—project. It began in dialogue with curator Virginie Bobin in Paris in 2017 and follows the thread of a script written for a performance that has yet to take place. Using local, obsolete knowledge systems, “neobarroso” poems, failed translations, and ambiguous ingredients, Bestiario de Lengüitas stages a choir of grotesque characters who try to maintain chaos and excess in a world calling for order, efficiency, and transparency. Azpilicueta pays a tribute to “proto-scientific” knowledge primarily disseminated among women—such as midwives and witches—before religion, capitalism, and modern medicine silenced them. The uncanny contaminations that occur between plants and bodies were fed by several encounters in the streets of Paris, the Botanical garden of Madrid, and the magical forests of Bolzano—thus generating a new embodied cartography of knowledge that transpires through scripts, drawings, and artworks by mobilizing storytelling, fables, and the reactivation of ancient rituals.