WICHÍ TEXTILE ART IN NEW YORK

Claudia Alarcón (b. 1989, Argentina) is an Indigenous textile artist from the La Puntana community of Wichí people of northern Salta. Alongside her individual practice, she leads the Silät collective, an organization of one hundred women weavers of different generations from Wichí communities in the Alto la Sierra and La Puntana region. Wichí society is clan-based and matrilocal. Weaving with hand-spun vegetal fibers from the local chaguar plant has been a communal, female-led activity for centuries, and is fundamental to the visual culture, narrative history and economics of the Wichí people.

The centrality of weaving to the Wichí communities is articulated in a mythological tale in which women, living in the sky as stars, would travel down to earth on woven chaguar ropes to dine on the fish caught by fishermen. Upon discovering this, the men employed the help of birds to snap the ropes and the women were trapped on earth for evermore but continued to weave and pass the knowledge from the world above onto their daughters. This parable suggests a passage from the naivety and freedom of childhood to the societal responsibilities of adulthood; girls are taught to spin chaguar and weave functional objects from the age of 12, their creations a way to provide financially as well as to sustain ancestral cultural practices.

In another sense, learning to weave presents a further awakening, an entryway into a collective conversation between the women of the Wichí communities. The textiles, formed of geometric motifs drawn from the surrounding environment, are a method of communicating unspoken thoughts within a culture that highly values forms of non-verbal expression, and the messages found within dreams and subconscious intuition. The Silät collective emerged from the Thañí/Viene del monte organization, a wider public project aimed at reviving ancestral textile traditions across the Salta region.

Coordinated by Alarcón and working closely with curator Andrei Fernández since 2015, Silät explores the possibilities of artmaking within and beyond these traditions. The collective have evolved established techniques into new forms, producing large-scale images that exploit the textural intricacies and earthy colours of chaguar yarn and natural dyes. In coordinating the production of the Silät collective and leading experimentations in material and subject matter within their practice, Alarcón supports creativity, independence and self-sustaining practices, and provides a means for women across generations to transmit a contemporary indigenous culture into the webs of international art dialogues, beyond ethnographic readings.

This exhibition presents Alarcón and Silät’s contribution to the rich tradition of South American geometric abstraction and highlights the ongoing significance of Wichí artworks to global modernism.

The exhibition will be on display from April 11 through May 10, 2025, at the gallery’s 52 Walker space, 52 Walker St, New York (United States).

*Cover image: photo by Clara Johnston