Son[i]a #458
Francisco Huichaqueo
Photo: Juan Wenuan
Francisco Huichaqueo (b. Wallmapu, Chile, 1977) is a Mapuche artist, filmmaker, curator and university lecturer. His work emerges from an indigenous creative practice that is deeply embedded in the Mapuche worldview, linked to the urgent need to imagine, restore, and reactivate memories and knowledge through other ways of seeing, listening to, and inhabiting the world. Huichaqueo’s films are based on observation, circular time, and the breath of the earth. His images evoke, record, and feel the land, rather than portraying it.
In Huichaqueo’s work, the natural world is a living, irrepressible presence. Water, forests, smoke, stones, and the wind appear as bodies with memory –ancient languages that modernity has sought to translate, classify, or silence. In response to this, Francisco Huichaqueo sees Mapuche filmmaking as film medicine to heal the spirit (or kelluwün): a visual and sound practice that restores connections, redresses absences, and reactivates displaced forms of knowledge.
In this podcast, Francisco Huichaqueo weaves together Mapuche culture and pewma (dreams as revelation or illumination) to reflect on his work as a filmmaker and on his encounter with colonial museums and collections. From this perspective, he talks about processes of restitution and ‘Mapuchisation’ of these institutions: display cases become contested spaces rather than mausoleums, artefacts of memory breathe anew, official narratives are rewritten, and Mapuche spirituality once again inhabits that which colonial violence sought to deactivate.
Conversation: Anna Ramos and Alexandra Bellini. Script: Ricardo Cárdenas. Sound production: Albert Tarrats. Voice over: Valeria Brugnoli. Sounds: RWM Working Group.
ATTRIBUTION/NON-COMMERCIAL/SHARE-ALIKE 4.0 INTERNATIONAL (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)
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