To see a World in a Grain of Sand,
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand,
And Eternity in an hour.
— William Blake, “Auguries of Innocence” (1863)
To come and go in trance: a hypnosis that allows access to other forms of communication, facilitating the dissolution between the conscious and the unconscious, between life and death. In the 19th century, spiritism emerged, situated between Christianity and psychoanalysis, as a possibility for reconnecting the earthly world with the realm of spirits. This movement not only opened new doors to the imaginary but also provided many women writers and artists with a space of freedom to transcend the limitations imposed by traditional society. Victor Hugo, in his work The Haunted Tables of Jersey (1850), documented his spiritist experiences during his exile, describing how tables “danced” in mediumistic sessions, offering the possibility of contact with beings from other worlds. This practice not only allowed him to explore his own unconscious, but also reflected the emancipatory power of Spiritism, particularly for women, who found in these experiences a creative and communicative avenue beyond the patriarchal structures of the time.
In The Dancing Tables, an unpublished exhibition at the C3A in Córdoba, Mercedes Azpilicueta (La Plata, Argentina, 1981) explores the creative space that emerges through Spiritism, reconstructing the life of Amalia Domingo Soler (Seville, 1835 – Barcelona, 1909), the most charismatic promoter of the Spiritist movement in the Spanish-speaking world and a precursor of gender equality. Domingo Soler dedicated her life to defending a more just and equal society, expressing her ideals through numerous publications. In this exhibition, some of her writings, present in their first editions, serve as a starting point for wandering between two worlds, revealing how Spiritism became an emancipatory movement for women artists who were severely limited by the patriarchal norms of the time.
As Jennifer Higgie states in her book The Other Side: A Journey into Women, Art, and the Spirit World (2023), “Spiritism offered women a space in which they could explore and express ideas beyond social conventions, creating art that challenged established norms and channeled the spiritual.”
Azpilicueta finds in the uniqueness of Domingo Soler’s texts a reflection of her own concerns, and together they establish a cosmic dance of shared experiences, summed up in the idea of migration: between the arts and letters, between cities and countries, between the real and the spiritual, between reason and the mystical and healing dream, between then and now, bringing us closer to a new tower of knowledge. Since 2015, Mercedes Azpilicueta has positioned her practice as a form of historiographical intervention, based on interdisciplinarity. Through fluid and associative connections, she counters rigid historical narratives, making space for the emergence of affective and dissident voices, recovering latent resonances in the archives of a possible future. On this occasion, she presents an immersive and ever-changing performative and sculptural installation. The exhibition space simulates a time-suspended environment, unsettling, where characters converge among the remains of dysfunctional furniture. It is a space that resonates with the interiority of the mind, oscillating between refuge and hostility. As Victor Hugo wrote in Contemplations (1856): “The visible is made of the invisible.”
In the universe created by the Argentine artist for the T3 room at C3A, spectral characters inspired by the protagonists of Amalia Domingo Soler’s books roam—transhuman and unsettling beings. The viewer enters a world where the boundary between the real and the dreamlike, between the material and the spiritual, blurs through a play of light and shadow. The tables seem to dance to the rhythm of a sound installation that envelops the entire exhibition space, suggesting performative gestures that oscillate between the choreography of the invisible and the spontaneous. Three-dimensional sculptures, dressed in typical Cordoban attire, tables suspended in space, textile elements, and walls decorated with a series of drawings made by the artist specifically for this exhibition, create an atmosphere where shadows gradually reveal themselves, causing the viewer to lose their sense of reality and become immersed under the influence of invisible forces in a universe that transcends the tangible. This exhibition becomes an immersive experience, where perception is not limited to sight but involves all the senses, allowing one to visualize the ethereal and the spiritual, reminding us how art can make the invisible visible, as Victor Hugo attempted with his spinning tables. Azpilicueta creates imaginary
characters that wander in an uninterrupted coming and going, between times, between dreams and nightmares; between the limits
of language and the expressive potential of the image, in a ghostly room that escapes all control exerted by reason. Cavernous sounds, evoking communications with ethereal and ghostly characters from Amalia Domingo Soler’s books, immerse the visitor in an imagined and otherworldly space where stories converge that call upon the political place of the Spiritist movement. The work of interpretation and prediction, carried out by women, required a high degree of intuition and sensitivity toward all that remains invisible to the eye. In this case, Domingo Soler, nearly blind to the earthly world, possessed a vision that transcended life.
The web of works by Mercedes Azpilicueta in The Dancing Tables invites a journey through textures, images, cavernous sounds, and smells, where the real and the spiritual collapse their boundaries. The Dancing Tables dismantle the idea of reality as a refuge of the secure and stable; and reason, which at times migrates toward the inexplicable, loses its place as the last bastion, leaving us exposed to a wandering existence