MASP: CONTESTED NARRATIVES BETWEEN REPLICA AND WEAVING

The Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand presents, simultaneously, two exhibitions that address a shared concern from different perspectives: how narratives in Latin American art are constructed and legitimized. On one hand, Sandra Gamarra Heshiki’s first retrospective exhibition, titled Réplica (Replica), critically revisits art history and its exhibition dispositifs; on the other, Vivir, tejer (Living, Weaving) brings together the work of Claudia Alarcón alongside the Silät collective, foregrounding ancestral knowledge and collective modes of creation from the Wichí people.

With more than 70 works produced over 25 years, Réplica (Replica) unfolds a sustained strategy of appropriation and displacement. Gamarra Heshiki reproduces, reinterprets, and alters historical pieces to expose the mechanisms of selection, exclusion, and hierarchy that structure museums. This inquiry also materializes in the creation of LiMac—a fictional museum founded in 2002—which operates both as archive and institutional critique. By replicating the authority of the museum, the artist introduces a fissure in its apparent neutrality: if the museum dictates history, it can also rewrite it.

The exhibition adopts classical chronology—“Pre-colonial,” “Colonial,” “Post-independence,” “Modern,” and “Contemporary”—only to subvert it from within. Works such as Recurso VII (Resource VII) (2019) reinterpret Frans Post’s colonial landscapes through the use of iron oxide, evoking both Indigenous practices and the violence of colonization. In Doble (Double) (2023), the artist replicates a painting by Francisco Laso but inverts the depicted figure, introducing the Andean concept of Pachakuti—“the world upside down”—as a gesture that destabilizes the museographic order.

In parallel, Vivir, tejer (Living, Weaving) proposes a reflection from another standpoint: not the institution, but territory and community. The exhibition brings together 25 works made from chaguar fiber by Claudia Alarcón & Silät, a collective of more than one hundred Wichí women weavers from the Gran Chaco. Drawing on traditional techniques linked to the production of yicas—everyday-use bags—the artists expand the textile language into contemporary formats while maintaining a strong cultural grounding.

Far from an individualistic logic, Silät’s practice is organized through collaboration: multiple weavers intervene in a single piece, generating compositions where different formal decisions converge. This collective dimension not only redefines modes of production but also introduces a political reading of authorship and the circulation of art. In works such as Hilulis ta llhaiematwek — Un coro de yicas (A Chorus of Yicas) (2024–25), more than one hundred individual pieces are presented together, functioning as a choral dispositif in which each variation of color or pattern points to a singular voice within a shared structure.

Wichí mythology informs much of the production. In Kates tsinhay — Mujeres estrellas (Star-Women) (2023), Alarcón draws on an ancestral narrative in which women descend from the sky through woven threads, combining traditional geometries with figurative elements. Here, textile emerges as a language that, even in silence, conveys memory, worldview, and history.

Although they stem from different contexts and materialities, both exhibitions converge in a shared critical operation: to question the ways in which hegemonic narratives are constructed. While Gamarra Heshiki intervenes in the archive and the institution to expose their fissures, Alarcón & Silät activate a situated practice that affirms other forms of knowledge. In this intersection, the museum ceases to function as a site of univocal legitimation and instead becomes a contested field, where history, memory, and contemporaneity intertwine and are rewritten.

Both exhibitions are part of MASP’s annual program dedicated to Latin American Histories.