SON[I]A #408
Seba Calfuqueo
Being and thinking Mapuche
Growing up with a stigma
Patriarchy breathes in my face
What does it mean to be Mapuche for people living in the city?
The anus is the most democratic thing of all
What happens with the objects behind the museum displays that belong to the Mapuche people?
The Mapuche are a very complex and diverse people
History: a fascinating place
Inhabiting constant discomfort in art
Visuality and coloniality
Going beyond my personal practice
Text and body
An artist of projects more than techniques
Symbols of the Mapuche world
There are things that cannot be translated
Observe nature, everything is there.
Seba Calfuqueo (b. Santiago de Chile, 1991) talks about labels such as ‘artist’, ‘Mapuche’ and ‘trans’ in a practice that engages with these categories but tends to defy them. Mindful of language issues and of the Mapuche tradition to which they are heir, Seba highlights the ideology embedded in history in order to question it and encourage a debate open to all. Their archival work and research into Mapuche memory feeds into works in various media—installation, video, ceramics, performance—, in which performance plays an important role in transcending the centrality of images in Western culture. Whether alone or in collectives, Seba presents their pieces in a range of contexts, focusing on the complexity of the intersection of different cultural spheres and aware that not everything can be translated.
In this podcast, Seba Calfuqueo dismantles heroes, monuments and categories, while reclaiming gaps, taboos and the elements as spaces of complexity from which to strike up conversation. They also talk about owning where you come from and the position from which you speak. And they argue for the collective occupation of spaces that have historically been denied to the Mapuche people. For Seba, being Mapuche means having a connection with the land, and in this conversation they present a way of understanding of life in which queerness is the very essence of nature.
Aura Cumes
Aura Cumes charts a lucid historical path through colonial processes, analysing the mechanisms of control, violence, and dispossession that have perversely shaped the identity of the native-servant, relegated in favour of the progress and well-being of white men, their families, and their capital. Racism and sexism thus progress side by side, in a web of exploitation in which hierarchies often overlap.
Liisa-Rávná Finbog
In this podcast, we talk with indigenous Sámi researcher, writer, curator and artist Liisa-Rávná Finbog about napkins, museums, collections, and colonialism, to challenge hierarchies, cultural extractivism, and the hidden violence in any process of cultural assimilation. We also highlight the causal relationship between art and coloniality, questioning the separation between function and aesthetics. Duodji thus emerges as an ancestral practice and knowledge system — that dismantles and emancipates itself from the Western construct of craft, while invoking a dialogical relationship with materiality. We open a portal to understand and share the ways of thinking, being, and existing in interdependence, of the Sámi people.
Elvira Espejo Ayca
Elvira Espejo Ayca is an indigenous artist, weaver, writer, poet and researcher. Her work brings to light collective strategies that resist monoculturalization, moving back and forth between the rural and urban, between ancestral practices and the colonial gaze, between the sentipensamiento (feeling-thinking) of indigenous peoples and the predominance of academic Eurocentrism. In this podcast, we take a deep dive into the actions of the National Museum of Etnography and Folklore (MUSEF) of La Paz (Bolivia) in search of mutual understanding and respect, while weaving and reweaving the historical gaps and bridges between two worlds.