Mercedes Azpilicueta

De Rebelse Lusthof deals with the long history of the Oranjewoud estate, initially recorded from a largely colonial perspective. Azpilicueta recreates this history by combining past and present, fiction and fact, and by making new comparisons and adding elements. The result is a revised historiography in which people and plants are intertwined, and in which women in particular play a much larger role than in traditional history of Oranjewoud.

Fruits and weeds, labour and leisure, chatelaines and knotted cloths, baroque and cosmic connections, field workers, literaries, poets, rebels and royals grow together anarchically at Mercedes Azpilicueta’s De Rebelse Lusthof (2022), a garden that may or may not have existed to tell its own story.

In this tapestry the poet Rixt Frisian appears as the central character. ‘Rixt’ is a pseudonym for Hendrika Akke van Dorssen. Amidst the back-then conservative literary landscape in Fryslân, Rixt published love verses and erotic lyrical poetry. Bell object used to give a signal of a working shift. This is the bell of the nineteenth-century country estate Oranjestein in Oranjewoud. It was used to signal the beginning and end of the working day with shifts lasting usually around 12 hours."