As stated on their website, Sebastián Calfuqueo Aliste is from Mapuche origin and "their work appeals to their cultural inheritance in order to propose a critical reflection on the social, cultural and political status of the Mapuche subject in the contemporary Chilean society and Latin America. Their work includes installation, ceramics, performance and video art with in order to explore the cultural similarities and differences as well as the stereotypes produced from the cross between indigenous and western ways of thinking. Their work has also the purpose of making the problems feminism and sexual dissidence movements present visible."
Ko ta mapungey ka (Water is also territory)*
The work establishes a poetic and political relationship between the water, the body, the Mapuche language and the territory. In a combination of techniques, the installation proposes a path that goes through the water toponymies in Mapudungun (Foyeko, Kallfüko, Kürruko, Renayko, among others), the insistent message “Mapu kishu angkükelay, kakelu angkümmapukey” (The soil does not dry by itself, others dry it), the map of the territory that today corresponds to Chile and extracts of the articles 5 and 9 of the Chilean Water Code published in 1981, in the middle of the dictatorship, which established the water in Chile as a marketable good.
Other pieces of the work are ceramic moldings shaped as water containers of different capacities and sizes in shades of blue, intervened with the concepts: “SEQUÍA”, “SAQUEO” Y “PETORCA LEWFÜ” [DROUGHT, LOOTING, PETORCA RIVER].The last part of the work is a performance recording showing the artist’s face with a Guñelve (Morning Star), symbol of the Mapuche resistance, painted on their face.
The work seeks to question the historical bonds between the water and the Mapuche people in relation with the neoliberal extractivism present in Chile and its water-privatizing model.
Installation:
20 blue enameled ceramic pieces (3 carved and intervened with text), 5 canvases with drawings and writing in cobalt-blue ointment, herb incense (eucalyptus and pine) and video performance, 1920×1080,FULL HD,15 minutes.
*The bio and the explanation of the work comes directly from Calfuqueo's website.