SEBA CALFUQUEO: "I AM INTERESTED IN BLOWING UP PRE-ESTABLISHED IDEAS ABOUT THE INDIGENOUS"

Seba Calfuqueo (Santiago, Chile, 1991) presents Cautín at the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, a brilliant exhibition organized by the museum itself and TBA21 in which history, Mapuche identity, and Wallmapu—the "historical territory"—are interwoven with a perspective marked by urban life, hybridization, and family memory. Featuring over thirty new works, the artist challenges Western gazes and homogeneous representations of Indigenous people, incorporating her personal experience and recovering little-known chronicles as part of reconstructing a memory traversed by colonial violence. We spoke with her about her vision of art and the creative process behind an exhibition in which the Cautín River serves as the central axis, reflecting the idiosyncrasy of her artistic approach.

Álvaro de Benito [Á.B.]: The exhibition you are presenting at the Thyssen brings together, in a way, your community and origins with the experience of having grown up in a city. You have mentioned on occasion that you start from a position close to the root, but "contaminated." Which carries more weight when constructing your artistic language? At what point do you feel that root becomes most powerful?

Seba Calfuqueo [S.C.]: It is necessary to understand that the Mapuche world is also a very urban world. The largest population is in Santiago, where many of us identify as Mapuche. For me, growing up in the city as an Indigenous person was very complex, because thirty years ago racism was brutal. Having an Indigenous surname, grandparents who did not speak Spanish well, and continuing to be viewed as a stereotype due to prejudice and racism made me grow up always as an "otherness." Ever since primary school I felt that rejection, and there were very violent notions surrounding how my childhood and adolescence were constructed because I was an Indigenous person.

Á.B.: And how did that experience of growing up in the city translate into your relationship with your own family and with the territory?

S.C.: I grew up in both contexts. My mother, who was Chilean, was taken in by my grandmother’s family after being kicked out of the house by my grandfather when she became pregnant with my oldest brother. I grew up with that Mapuche family, in a very matriarchal environment closely tied to my grandmother, who was fundamental in passing down my identity. She was the only one in her family living in the city, and her home was a meeting place for relatives arriving from the community. There, our language and practices coexisted with urban life, while in the territory other ways of living and relating were maintained. So I grew up in a Mapuche, matriarchal family, as opposed to a much more patriarchal and violent Chilean family.

Á.B.: From a European perspective, when someone approaches this exhibition, it is easy for their gaze to gravitate toward what they identify as Indigenous—the patterns, the textiles, certain visual codes—leaving the urban dimension in the background. Are you interested in reinforcing that distinction?

S.C.: No, I am interested in quite the opposite. I am interested in blowing up pre-established ideas about the Indigenous, because these are often based on racist, stereotyped, and colonial readings regarding what agency Indigenous people possess and from what position they should speak. That is why I use video animation, technology, and synthetic hair—elements that go beyond my Indigenous self and also connect with other intersections of my identity, such as my gender, being a trans person, and my aesthetic fascinations.

Á.B.: How do all those elements that form part of your identity and those aesthetic attractions relate to the position from which you construct your work?

S.C.: I am a Mapuche person, but I am not a leader or a spokesperson for my community. I try to create an imagery related to my origin and my place, but traversed by my own experience and by everything that constitutes me. That is why I speak of a "contaminated" exhibition, with references and connections that do not conform to the traditional Indigenous narrative constructed by the Western art world. I feel that is somewhat my position: to dismantle those structures and to question the gaze that exoticizes the Indigenous. It is very easy to fall into that exoticization when an Indigenous person is expected to reproduce certain rituals or images to explain a reality they have not necessarily lived. My generation of artists is precisely attempting to break away from that.

Á.B.: In opposition to that gaze expecting to find certain worn-out, homogeneous codes or forms of representation, what are you interested in asserting or bringing to the fore from your own experience?

S.C.: For me, it is far more important to speak about all that contamination, about that mesh that constitutes me as a person who inhabits the city, who speaks from her origin, who organizes collectively, and who works in connection with other Indigenous people.

Á.B.: All of that ultimately rests on that concept of hybridization you often mention. That is to say, it is not only racial or geographical hybridization; there are also many dimensions within that concept.

S.C.: To some extent, the idea of hybridization is also a way of escaping the idea of mestizaje. For me, mestizaje is a very violent concept that assumes the binding forces between the Indigenous world and the colonial world were neutral and horizontal, which was not the case at all. María Galindo has a concept I like very much, which is bastardaje ["bastardry"]—the notion that we are the product of a systematic violence that has shaped our histories into what they are.

Á.B.: What does move away from that idea of mestizaje imply for you, and why do you consider it important to question it when speaking about your own history and that of your people?

S.C.: The most violent part of all this is that the Mapuche people resisted Spanish colonization and were recognized as an autonomous territory by the Crown in the sixteenth century. Later, in the late nineteenth century, Chile and Argentina carried out colonial campaigns, and my grandparents were among those who had to migrate. It is a history less than a hundred years old, and being so close to my own family history, I cannot detach myself from the suffering and violence my grandparents endured.

Á.B.: You have frequently raised questions that correct certain colonial narratives, especially regarding Araucanía and the Chilean nineteenth-century campaigns, and you have also shown the role of women and the strength of the matriarchy in Mapuche society. Have you encountered problems or barriers when explaining these matters to Western discourses that present an erroneous view, almost by default?

S.C.: Yes, because they are not used to having that racial stereotype thrown back at them in the way they expect. The Western world expects me to behave in a certain way, and I am interested in quite the opposite. I am interested in using technology because I live in a contemporary world where I do not want a cultural appropriator to come and do work on the Indigenous world through technology. I prefer to use those tools myself and create those means myself. And performance also carries that meaning: it is embodying in flesh and presence a past of violence that remains present and continues to inflict violence upon many people.

Á.B.: Building on that idea of hybridization and all the references traversing your work, I wonder if there is a risk that your work might generate resistance within certain circles of your own community, precisely because it diverges from particular ways of understanding or representing the Indigenous.

S.C.: I feel my reception in the Mapuche world is quite good because I have also been very careful when working around history. Many of my works, especially my early pieces, deal with compiling archives that were not very visible. So I believe that, in a way, this also causes my practice to be viewed as serious work—one that does not reach such violent limits, but rather works more directly on how history has been constructed and how the archive serves as evidence that trans people and dissidents existed, that there were other forms of bodily expression, and that women held a different role in my community.

Á.B.: What importance does the archive hold for you in that reconstruction of memory and in the recovery of memories or chronicles left out of official narratives?

S.C.: It is about constructing through memory and through oral and written archives, especially those of Jesuit and Capuchin priests—Spanish and Italian—who did not colonize the territory, but did evangelize it. They introduced ideas that can be reproduced in our environment today, such as patriarchal or discriminatory attitudes, but which do not represent the community as a whole. The Mapuche world is highly diverse: there are those who defend radical autonomy, as well as people who are even Evangelical, so it cannot be categorized in a single way.

Á.B.: Ultimately, a community is composed of people with different ideologies, interests, manners, and experiences that extend beyond a unitary concept. How does that diversity influence your understanding of it?

S.C.: Something happens to me often in the art world: when I meet a curator, I tell them to go to Santiago, to get to know Chile. They cannot work solely from the ideas of those they already know or with the references they have; they must go to Chile and understand its history. Chile is a country constructed through a United States’ neoliberal experiment, not only during the dictatorship, but also since the early twentieth century and earlier, through other colonial projects. And obviously, when you go, you realize other things are happening. If one looks at that, one realizes there are many Mapuche communities conducting their ceremonies in the city and that a political articulation of those collectives exists.

Á.B.: In that sense, you are perhaps among the first Chilean artists exhibiting in Europe and North America who still lives in Chile. Being closer to that reality ultimately connects your language and discourse more directly to what is actually taking place, keeping it from being detached from what is being felt.

S.C.: The way the history and narrative of Chilean art outside Chile has been constructed has been very harsh. It is glaringly evident that Indigenous people have not been present in those representations, let alone people who do not come from an elite background. That is very violent. Their surnames are generally those of families with immense power, settlers as well, who constructed their narrative around this idea of what Chile was. I was born in a democracy under a constitution created by a dictator, but the Chile of the 1970s is not the Chile of today, where everything is privatized and the consequences of that dictatorship persist—for instance, with the issue of water.

Á.B.: What does it signify for you that this exhibition is taking place in Europe?

S.C.: It is a huge opportunity, not only for me, but also for a new generation of artists who were not supported by established artists. No older artist introduced me to any curator, any museum, or any institution. Everything I have built has been alongside my friends, my community, and my people. And that sets a radical precedent for how things are done and from where one speaks as well. For me, leaving Chile right now is not an option.

Á.B.: In the recently created works that comprise this exhibition, you maintain the use of various mediums—such as ceramics, embroidery, and painting—and each seems to relate to different elements of the territory. Do you feel each element of the ecosystem finds a distinct mode of expression in your practice?

S.C.: I am interested in considering what relationship the viewer will have with my work. All the materials I use I define as travestis: materials that fictionalize, simulate, deceive, cross-dress, or apply makeup to another element. I do not work with traditional materials. The ceramics feature luster, a highly toxic lead component that generates a sheen associated with shimmer within the Mapuche world, but which is neither organic nor natural: it is like life itself subjected to constant processes of contamination. The synthetic hair comes from wigs I disassemble and from my own personal history with hair—from growing up in male-dominated spaces where wearing extensions was always an issue. These materialities stem from my experience, not from an origin within my community as such.

Á.B.: How do you decide which material to use in each work, and what relationship do you seek to establish with the viewer through that choice?

S.C.: What I do is hybridize what constitutes me as a person, and the different mediums allow the viewer to approach the works in distinct ways. If I want to do something more narrative, I use video; if I want something more corporeal, I use hair, because it can provoke repulsion or, conversely, a desire to touch and comb it. These are mediums I have developed throughout my practice and that now, for the first time, I can deploy together, responding as well to my multifaceted interests as an individual.

Á.B.: When underscoring the symbolic importance of what territory entails, I am interested to know if you conceive a single real way to encompass or interpret it.

S.C.: No, not at all. Cautín does not attempt to speak for the river. What I did in this exhibition was travel through a territory that belongs to my family, a river to which I have been connected throughout my entire life. My most important video performances and works were made in its flow.

Á.B.: And what does travel along the Cautín mean to you after so many years of relating to it?

S.C.: It is like the closure of a long process of dialogue with that river. I do not know if it will truly be an end, because I might continue making works with the Cautín. For me, what was important was generating a narrative that accounted for the journey and my experience of inhabiting and traveling through it, rather than asserting that it is a human subject possessing rights. I am not going to speak for the river: it speaks for itself, and the species present are the ones accompanying me on this journey.

Seba Calfuqueo. Cautín is on view through January 17, 2027, at the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Paseo del Prado, 8, Madrid (Spain).