Claudia Alarcón & Silät: Living, Weaving.

Collective memory, material knowledge, and the politics of textile practice.

2 June 2026

In ‘Claudia Alarcón & Silät: Viver Tecendo‘, the Argentine artist presents a body of work developed in close collaboration with the Silät collective, a group of more than one hundred Wichí women weavers. Bringing ancestral knowledge into dialogue with contemporary forms, the exhibition traces an evolving textile language rooted in the Gran Chaco, where chaguar fibre, cosmology, and collective labour converge. At its core lies a practice that moves between individual and shared authorship, where weaving becomes both a site of cultural continuity and a medium for articulating presence, resistance, and voice.

Brendon Bell-Roberts: Your work is developed in close collaboration with the Silät collective. How does this relationship shape your role as an exhibiting artist, and how is authorship understood within the exhibition?

Claudia Alarcon: I am part of Silät, a project I imagined with other women. I am one of the founders of the group. Being part of this has allowed us to learn and discover many things. It did not begin three years ago, when we started calling ourselves Silät, but nearly a decade ago, in 2017, when we began to organise with the support of Andrei Fernández. Our group has changed over time, shaping what it is today. Since the beginning, we have felt the need to come together to defend our knowledge, held in the practice of weaving and in the ways all Wichí women learn, as taught by our mothers and grandmothers. Each pattern we weave has a reason – it is an echo of life and carries meaning. When we began making larger pieces – almost like a scream – we had a silät, a message to share: we are still alive, and we are still weaving. The nation-state has often tried to erase our people – not only our physical presence, but also our knowledge and our ways of seeing and experiencing the world. Wichí people, like many Indigenous peoples where I live, have been dispossessed for decades. Much has been taken from us: we are not allowed to speak our language in schools, and our knowledge has been pushed aside. Large parts of our territory have been destroyed. These are difficult times. But they have not taken away our desire to weave. At Silät, women of different ages create pieces together. We gather in assemblies to decide what we want to make. We support each other, talk through ideas and compositions, and choose the colours and themes we want to share and reflect on. Silät’s pieces are made using the same techniques and motifs that have long existed within our people’s history, especially in the making of bags. What Silät introduced were ruptures in traditional patterns and rhythms: shapes that act as interruptions. The German artist Olaf Holzapfel showed us that these kinds of ruptures could exist within weaving, and working with him opened this possibility for us. Something new appeared – something we still do not know how to name, but that has found a place in art. This exploration through weaving opens new possibilities: new ways of weaving and new ways of presenting what we weave. Alongside the entire process of building our group, which I have led since the beginning, not because I wanted to take on that role, but because one of us had to step forward and represent the others, and I happened to be able to do it, I began learning and imagining other ways to defend our knowledge, our work, and the identity of our people. By gathering, we recovered the joy of weaving. That encouraged me to explore new compositions in my textiles, new ways for the shapes that have always existed in Wichí weaving to come together. That is how I began making what I now call “my pieces.” Little by little, I started presenting myself as an artist, coming to understand what it meant to call myself that. Over time, I developed a universe of my own, always carried by the legacy of my ancestors. I keep making pieces I consider my own. I make them with family members and sign them with my initials, CA.

Silät, meaning “message,” is central to the collective’s identity. What messages are you seeking to foreground in this body of work, and how do they resonate across both community and museum contexts?

The word silät can also be translated as “announcement.” We want to share what we know how to do: the continuity and resistance we are part of. We weave living stories. Weaving allows us to share who we are, our inheritance, and our connection to other living beings and presences that send us messages. Everything that cannot be said in words is shared through our weavings – stories that have always been part of our communities. The 2025 series, titled “Paths and Scars,” presented in this exhibition at MASP, gathers a group of pieces in which we weave ourselves in relation to our territory, moving among different beings. Paths appear, along with trees, plants, birds, fish, mammals, and winds. For us, these weavings are a manifestation in many senses. The first time they were shown was in our own community: we carried them with our hands, held them up on sticks, like flags in a procession for Argentina’s Independence Day. We walked with them through all the institutions in our community, as if we were just one more among them. We are pioneers in our territory for having founded a women’s organisation. These weavings carry traces of those who have passed before us and left their marks, as well as scars of what was once opened and then closed again. Tayhin is a Wichí word that can be translated as “weaving,” but it can also mean “building,” “rebuilding,” and “healing.” The skin that regenerates over a wound is called layik; this same word also names the weavings we make with the chaguar plant: a new skin that heals.
In the same way, the monte, called tayhi in our language, weaves and heals itself. We live within a weaving of scars. The pieces we present show that we weave beyond ourselves: we weave continuities and leave an inheritance for our communities, trusting that younger generations will continue this path. We know there is still much to say and understand, but we trust that other women – perhaps our daughters – will take up these traces, these new paths, and continue weaving the future.

You are known for leading the weavers and reviving the “antique stitch,” a complex chaguar fibre technique that had fallen out of use. How does this act of recovery inform your practice and the collective’s engagement with memory and continuity?

At Silät, we care for the knowledge passed down from generation to generation through weaving – the memory and continuity of our people. During the pandemic, in 2020, I imagined a textile with vibrant colours like the rays of sunlight at dawn – those that find their way through dense trees and illuminate even the ground. I thought about light and how, without it, that radiance could not exist. By then, I had already begun to feel the need to reclaim this technique, the ancient stitch we call fwokatsaj ch’ötey in the Wichí language. It felt like listening to a living memory carried by some of the older women. When I wove my first large piece, I used this stitch. Estela Saavedra, a fellow weaver, was the only person who knew how to do it, and she taught me.
I was always drawn to the patience this process requires: attention to detail and to the finishing touches. After learning it, I encouraged other young women to learn it as well, and together we brought it back to life. I realised then that this ancient stitch, though almost forgotten, could still be revived. It was beginning to rise again and, like a ray of sunlight, it could travel far and move through many things. I kept weaving pieces with this stitch to bring back the legends and stories of our people. I felt there was much to relive – or perhaps more precisely, to awaken. I kept wondering how to do this, because there are things that perhaps cannot be said, but can be expressed through weaving. Some people can understand or feel these things through weaving. I understood that, although we weave in silence, everything is already there in the weaving. Learning this technique created a new connection between us—not only in the present, but also with our ancestors and other times.

The exhibition traces a shift from individually woven yica bags to collaborative textile production. How has this evolution influenced your artistic vision and the scale or ambition of the works?

The need to defend our knowledge and imagine new ways of survival led us beyond the kinds of pieces we traditionally wove. For a long time, weaving was mainly used to make yicas, bags that carried food and our belongings. Yicas have also always been part of who we are. We still use them today, as do people connected to our communities and those who live near us. Upon the arrival of those who occupied and transformed the territory where we have always lived, we had to weave to earn money and buy food. When we came together, we decided that weaving would not only help sustain us but could also become a way to share messages and create possibilities for a better life. We quickly understood that coming together made us stronger and gave us more opportunities. After several years of selling woven pieces through craft fairs and design spaces, we began working collectively, exploring larger scales and moving toward the art world. This became possible thanks to the support of curator Andrei Fernández and artist Guido Yannitto, who later became our first gallerist. It still feels strange to refer to my “artistic vision.” I relate to my work as a practice: I experiment with imagination, movement, and expansion, exploring what is possible through weaving, what the chaguar plant is capable of. Chaguar is our teacher; like us, it always finds a way to adapt to change.

While the practice is rooted in tradition, the works move beyond customary yica formats. How do you approach expanding these forms while remaining grounded in Wichí knowledge systems?

The yica, which we call hilú in our language, remains at the heart of everything I do as an artist and as part of Silät. Even though the pieces we weave today, both on my own and with the group, do not always take the shape of bags, they continue the same gesture that once made these shapes bloom in women’s hands. That gesture now unfolds in new ways through our work. Since childhood, I learned by watching how stitches come together, how threads join so the weaving can expand and hold weight: this is where Wichí knowledge lives, in the very structure of weaving and in the shapes that create the skin protecting food and memory. When we began working on larger pieces to hang on walls, we did not invent new stitches; we used the same motifs and rhythms found in yicas and began fragmenting and stretching them, allowing shapes and figures to breathe in new ways. The ruptures and expansions we create now are not total departures but rather ways of opening the yica into a new landscape with greater freedom. It is a different space that sheds light on something we have always known. At the same time, everything we weave can fold back into a yica. I continue working within traditional and ancient weaving: the techniques for making stitches, and the ways our ancestors named each motif in relation to a living being. What I do is shift, enlarge, and combine these shapes to speak about other things: things that were once expressed differently, and new things happening to us now. But everything comes from the knowledge I inherited from the women in my family and the women I work alongside today.

The introduction of more vivid colours through aniline dyes marks a striking development. What role does colour play in expressing new narratives or emotional registers within the work?

Colour was one of the first things that allowed me to express new things through weaving. We began using aniline dyes not only because they are easier to find nearby, but because we are drawn to the possibilities they offer. Also, because many shades can no longer be obtained from the plants in our territory, the colours seem farther away now, harder and harder to find in the mountains. What is called “development” has taken away many of the colours that once lived with us. To me, colour is like another voice within the weaving. The intense tones of aniline dyes do not replace the shades we get from trees, ash, earth, and flowers; they coexist with them. I use both natural and artificial dyes in the same piece, and this combination speaks to the present: changes, products that arrive from outside, the way we adapt and incorporate things into our everyday life—things that come from elsewhere and become our own. Colour sets rhythms, paths, interruptions. It allows me to highlight certain motifs, to create spaces for pause or tension. The weaving tells stories not only through shapes but also through the way colours meet, collide, or join.

Wichí cosmology, including the story of the star women, appears in several works. How do you translate these narratives into visual form, and what draws you to these stories now?

Stories in our cosmology, such as the women who became stars, are not treated as illustrations but as movement within the weaving. They are stories that have always been told in the community, alive in conversations among people. When I bring them into the weaving, I think of paths that rise and fall, stitches that spread like seeds of light, strips of colour crossing the piece as if they were paths between sky and earth. I am drawn to these stories because they are about connections and decisions. In weaving, this appears as a motif that repeats itself until it suddenly changes direction into small shapes that seem to detach from the rest. I often work with the idea of a constellation: stitches that seem simple, but, once joined, become guidance. I feel the need to bring these stories into the present, so that girls and young people can see themselves in them, and understand that their bodies, their names, and their paths are also connected to that sky our grandmothers looked at while weaving.

The monte, or tayhi, is both a physical environment and a spiritual framework. How does this relationship to land and ecology shape your approach to material, pattern, and composition?

Things that grow, tangle, and open in the monte/tayhi also shape the way I approach material, motifs, and composition in my weaving. The communities in the Indigenous territory now known as Lhaka Honat (formerly Fiscal Lots 55 and 14, and for us “Chaco”) live with the monte: it is not just a landscape, but a living being we belong to, and when I go to gather chaguar among the trees, I can feel its fragrance. The monte is also a weaving of presences and absences. Emptiness grows where trees have been cut down. Periods of drought and floods return. The soil dries too quickly, and crops fail to grow, or mud isolates us after the rains; all of this is present in my compositions and in those of the group, like paths that open or disappear. I also choose the motifs I weave as if I were speaking with the beings that live in the Tayhi: animals, plants, spirits, winds. Many of the shapes come from that “visual alphabet” that Wichí women have always woven into yicas. Each design relates to a living being or to the landscape. When I work on a large piece, I do not arrange the motifs at random, but by imagining who meets whom in the textile: which paths cross, which presences come together, which forces hold one another in balance.

In installations such as Un coro de yicas, the accumulation of many individual pieces forms a collective statement. How do you conceive of these works as both visual compositions and expressions of shared voice?

In “A Chorus of Yicas,” each hilú is both a unique voice and a popular song known to many. Yicas carry the memories of entire lives. They also carry rhythm, a way of thinking with the hands, a silent melody. When this group of yicas comes together as a single piece, what emerges is a chorus: the pieces remain individual, made by women of different ages who are members of Silät, and they begin to sing together. N’otenek is a word in the Wichí language that can be translated as ‘song’ or ‘something imitated’; yicas can also be translated as ‘song’. In “A Chorus of Yicas,” shared memory becomes visible: weaving remains a common good, an imagination that belongs to the people and not only to those who make each piece. For this reason, these works are both visual compositions and collective affirmations. We no longer say “we are still alive,” but “this is our story, this is who we are.”

This exhibition marks your first presentation in a Brazilian museum. What does it mean for you to present your work alongside the Silät collective in this context, particularly in relation to the visibility of Indigenous women’s practices?

Presenting this work with Silät at a museum in Brazil feels like an embrace. I do not come alone: we come as a group of women who chose to walk together, not only among ourselves but also with others who accompany us and help us reach places we could not have imagined before. Silät is not only a group of Indigenous weavers. There are people within the organisation who take on different tasks so that the weavings can travel, be shown in different cities around the world, and also be narrated. Creating something new—a way of working, of organising ourselves, of being together—is a challenge we have taken on. For a long time, our weavings circulated as crafts without recognition of their true origin. For years, we were made anonymous, and our territories and ways of living were denied and erased. Often, alongside our work, the only information given was “Wichí community,” without acknowledging that in the northern province of Salta alone, there are more than 200 Wichí communities. Being in a museum, sharing our latest work, being recognised as Indigenous artists, having a book made about our story, and being acknowledged in different ways feels like a reclaiming: an opportunity to be part of spaces from which we once were excluded. It is also possible to create a new refuge from which to continue caring for the knowledge and imagination of our people. Brazil is also home to many Indigenous communities and forms of political organisation that differ from those in Argentina. Still, I feel that this exhibition offers encounters with other groups, other artists, and other people to be in dialogue with. We need to have conversations with people from our region, from the continent we are part of. We want it to be understood that these works are also songs, cries, flags, and memories. They are a reaffirmation of presence and a breath that allows us to keep going. Andrei and I often say that, together, we can transform what others decided would be our destiny.

The exhibition takes place at MASP (Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand) from March 6 to August 2, 2026.