W8 Summer Cinema X Mercedes Azpilicueta | Feature Film: The Holy Girl / La Niña Santa - Aug 14, 2016 Amsterdam
















W8 / Summer Cinema
Rozenstraat 59, Amsterdam

SUNDAY AUG 14
DOORS OPEN// 7PM
SCREENING// 8:15PM

ABOUT THE FILM// 
The Holy Girl / La Niña Santa (2004) by Lucrecia Martel and produced by Pedro Almodovar. An Argentinian independent feature film (106 min.) 

Mercedes saw The Holy Girl for the first time in Buenos Aires in 2004 and influenced her artistic practice in many aspects. She found in The Holy Girl a lot of precision in terms of addressing the present moment and believes that that particular relation to time connects to her performative practice. The film has many poetic fragments of dialogue. Somehow the oral narration, the everyday language, the voice in itself are important aspects in the film that later became core elements in Mercedes´ practice as well. The film, shot in a provincial town, has a critical view towards the middle class in Argentina, gender inequalities and emotional affairs within dysfunctional families. The way feelings and emotions are interconnected in all these different scenarios -some of them quite familiar- influenced her work. She found in The Holy Girl a very accurate way of looking and listening to things.

ABOUT THE ARTIST//
Mercedes Azpilicueta (AR,1981) lives and works in Amsterdam. Using the voice as a primary source, Mercedes Azpilicueta addresses the ambiguity of a personal and unrestrained at times collective subjectivity, applied to a rigorous formality and experimentation with sound and the affective quality of language. In her work she embraces on the one hand, a discourse of alterity by unmasking the way the voice is created by the whisper, the shout, onomatopoeia, singing, snippets of conversation and poetry. On the other hand, the voice is also crossed by the absurd, the cliché, the sagacity and even violence, within the time and space in which we develop our humanity and locality. In Azpilicueta´s provocative and hypnotic vocal arrangements where the body is used as a musical instrument, that unique, inimitable voice appears in full nudity, showing its ability to lead us out of ourselves, to places where neither the body nor the mind would have allowed us to reach.


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