Wichí artists’ textiles vividly investigate territory, memory, and collective authorship through ancestral weaving.
Claudia Alarcón & Silät, Kyelhkyup — El otoño [Outono] [Autumn], 2023. Hand-spun chaguar fiber, dyed with natural pigments and aniline, woven in yica stitch, 160 x 142cm. Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand (MASP). Photographer: Eduardo Ortega
MASP — Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand presents ‘Claudia Alarcón & Silät: Living, Weaving’, an exhibition dedicated to the textile practice of Argentine artist Claudia Alarcón and Silät, a collective of more than one hundred Wichí women weavers from northern Argentina. Curated by Adriano Pedrosa, artistic director of MASP, with assistant curator Laura Cosendey, the exhibition marks the first presentation of the artist and the collective in a Brazilian museum and brings together twenty-five works produced through collaborative weaving processes.
Wichí artists use chaguar fibre, a resilient bromeliad native to the semi-arid climate of the Gran Chaco region, to create their works. They prepare chaguar and use the hand-interlacing technique, rooted in the making of yica bags, an object central to Wichí material culture. Yicas, traditionally square, feature geometric motifs referencing local flora and fauna. While these traditions anchor Alarcón and Silät’s practice, the collective expands the yica’s format and visual language by designing workshops that explore new possibilities for scale, colour and composition.
The Silät collective was formally established in 2023 following earlier workshops that encouraged Wichí women to reinterpret traditional weaving practices within contemporary artistic frameworks. Historically, Wichí textiles were produced individually and characterised by subdued tones drawn from natural dyes. In recent years, the artists have introduced more vibrant colours by using aniline dyes during the fibre-preparation process, producing textiles in vivid shades of orange, fuchsia, and other hues. Equally significant are the collaborative methods developed by the group, allowing multiple weavers to work simultaneously on a single piece or to continue one another’s weaving.
Mythology and oral tradition also inform the collective’s visual language. In works such as ‘Kates tsinhay — Mujeres estrellas’ (2023), Alarcón draws on a Wichí myth in which women were once stars in the sky who descended to Earth each night along chaguar threads they had woven themselves. When the men discovered this secret, they cut the threads, leaving the women on Earth. By integrating geometric patterns with figurative elements depicting stars and celestial forms, the work translates this narrative into a woven visual structure that merges ancestral cosmology with contemporary textile practice.
The artists’ relationship to territory is central to the exhibition. In the Wichí language, the environment is called tayhi, a concept encompassing the landscape and its spiritual significance. In Spanish, the region is commonly described as monte, a term that suggests mountainous terrain but, in practice, refers to a predominantly flat landscape shaped by wind, daylight cycles, and seasonal change. These environmental rhythms appear in the colours and forms of the textiles. Works such as ‘Kyelhkyup — El otoño’ (2023), now part of MASP’s collection, evoke seasonal shifts in light, tone and texture within the Gran Chaco landscape.
Collective authorship and political visibility are emphasised in the installation ‘Hilulis ta llhaiematwek — Un coro de yicas’ (2024–25), which assembles more than one hundred woven bags produced by individual members of the collective. Displayed together, the works highlight both the individuality of each maker and the broader collective structure that underpins the project. The installation foregrounds textile practice as a form of cultural expression and political affirmation, addressing the historical marginalisation of Indigenous knowledge and the precarious conditions many weavers face.
Another work in the exhibition, ‘N’äyhay wet layikis — Caminos y cicatrizes’, reflects on the historical repression of Indigenous communities in Argentina. Alarcón and the collective conceived the piece in 2025 for Argentina’s Independence Day, drawing attention to the long history of state violence against Indigenous peoples while reaffirming the role of collective artistic practice as a site of memory and resistance.
Through these works, ‘Claudia Alarcón & Silät: Living, Weaving’ places Wichí textile traditions in contemporary art discourse, stressing collective practice, cultural transmission and territorial knowledge. The exhibition is part of MASP’s annual programme on Latin American Histories, highlighting diverse regional arts narratives.
‘Claudia Alarcón & Silät: Living, Weaving’ opened at MASP — Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand, São Paulo, on 6 March 2026 and runs until 2 August 2026. For more information, please visit MASP.
