Today Is Our Tomorrow, with Mercedes Azpilicueta

‘Today Is Our Tomorrow’ was a multidisciplinary arts festival organised by Helsinki-based curatorial agency PUBLICS in collaboration with local and international organisations. Taking place at club Kaiku, an underground music venue renowned for hosting an innovative lineup of DJs, and in the neighbouring spaces Kieku and Stidilä, the programme looked at non-hegemonic alternative futures presenting a roving constellation discussions, talks, workshops, installations, interventions, film screenings, live performances, DJ sets, curatorial projects, and live music intersecting with one another across three interconnected venues between 5pm to 5am.

For the their participation in the festival, Latitudes invited Buenos Aires-born, Amsterdam-based artist Mercedes Azpilicueta to present ‘Yegua-yeta-yuta’ (2015-ongoing). In her performance, Azpilicueta recites over four hundred insults directed to women in Argentina using a jargon of Castellano Rioplatense, spoken mainly in the areas in and around the Río de la Plata Basin of Argentina and Uruguay. The pronunciation of each word is disarmed phonetically to such an extent that it becomes an anthropophagic song or an exorcism. Azpilicueta performed to the beat of a new soundtrack produced for the occasion in collaboration with Chilean choreographer Rodrigo Sobarzo de Larraechea.

Running parallel during the same week (9–14 September), Frame Contemporary Art Finland organised ‘Gathering for Rehearsing Hospitalities’, a six-day gathering in which artists, curators, researchers and other critical minds were ‘invited to rehearse and debate hospitality towards diverse ways of knowing and challenging of dominant knowledges’.