Mercedes Azpilicueta's piece The Captive: Here's a Heart for Every Fate was made in 2019 at TextielLab, in the TextielMuseum in Tilburg. It consists of a large cotton-and-wool jacquard fabric tapestry on a wooden structure, evoking a theatre set design but with the typical dimensions and features of a historicist picture. Azpilicueta has woven a broad constellation of references to literature, history, mythology, popular culture and art into the tapestry. By combining these devices, she questions and subverts the stereotypes underlying the construction of Argentinian national identity.

Azpilicueta's art is marked by syncretism and a reinterpretation of styles and icons drawn from art history; she often explores dissident figures and paths to narrate alternative stories.  Here, the artist delivers a re-interpretation of the myth of Lucía Miranda —a European woman captured by indigenous Argentinians in the sixteenth century— whose story helped forge the archetypal notion of the captive white woman, significantly influencing the country's literary and cultural tradition, especially from the nineteenth century onwards. The figure of the captive took on an iconic status as a symbol of Argentina's own national identity, metaphorically representing ‘the body of the homeland’. Azpilicueta plays with different images to complicate the legend and warn us that our perception of history is always a construct and that any single truth is impossible. At the same time, she retrieves and gives voice to other marginalised figures, such as Eduarda Mansilla, one of the first great Argentine novelists, who was sidelined by the hegemonic historical discourse. To achieve this, Azpilicueta superimposes styles and elements from art history, adopting an eclectic approach that draws elements from the avant-garde collage and surrealism, but also from Baroque and historicist painting.

The tapestry becomes a canvas in which multiple figures and historical references converge, from Baroque gouaches to nineteenth century paintings and indigenous mythological iconographies. There are silhouettes taken from Un viajero virreinal¡: Acuarelas inéditas de la sociedad rioplatense [A Traveller in the Viceroyalty: Unseen Watercolours from River Plate Society], a catalogue which —like the exhibition of the same name staged at the National Museum of Fine Arts in Buenos Aires in 2015–2016— contains iconographic seventeenth and eighteenth centuries works from the 'customs and traditions' genre, one of the first shows of its kind from the River Plate Viceroyalty. There are also many references to the naturalist painting of the nineteenth-century and fragments of the Juan Manuel Blanes' allegorical painting La cautiva [The Captive] —a romantic depiction of the myth of Lucía Miranda painted around 1880— as well as images of Indians on horseback taken from La vuelta del malón [Returning from the Raid], by painter Ángel Della Valle, another example of academicist painting centring on the same legend, which was among the first works to employ it as an exaltation of the national spirit. As well as this iconography, there are mythological animals and creatures such as the Ao Ao, drawn from Guarani lore.

Azpilicueta uses these stylistic devices to build a piece with a variegated aesthetic that evokes the complexity of Baroque art and fuses elements of colonial Europe with postmodern forms. This approach —which she calls transhistorical— reflects a fluid, dynamic conception of history. She creates a dreamlike scene, blurring the borders between the human and the non-human, the real and the mythical. Taking her inspiration from Latin American magical realism, she presents animals with human bodies, a sky that fuses with the earth and elusive characters floating among the clouds. The images in The Captive: Here's a Heart for Every Fate fragment and combine, challenging racial, speciesist, and gender-based dichotomies. Through this juxtaposition, Azpilicueta not only reconstructs and deconstructs the tale of the white captive; she also imagines a space of resistance and subversion in which dissident and fluid identities coexist.

The very title of the work, The Captive: Here's a Heart for Every Fate suggests multiple different destinies and possibilities. It is an invitation to explore the contradictions inherent in the human experience. By evoking the legend of Lucía Miranda and the multiple interpretations it has spawned over the years, Azpilicueta invites critical reflection on the construction of national identity and the colonial narratives on which it is built. The piece suggests a reconfiguration of visual culture that transcends its historical and geographical context to pose universal questions on memory, identity and resistance.

Clara Derrac