Mari Mari Kom Pu Che, Inche Francisco Huichaqueo.
I present myself as a Mapuche creator. My work is woven with visualities, soundscapes, and diverse materialities — as well as with lives — that emerge from the land. Through them, I seek to foster a deep dialogue between knowledge, cosmovision, and spirituality. It is an threshold movement that, far from being static, flows from a walking-visioning, constantly through contemplative and premonitory reflections. These allow me to find points of contact and reciprocity, which I conceive as practices embedded in circular ritualization.
With the camera as a vessel that transports and shelters, film and the creation of cinematic projections — as healing breaths — on ancestral ceramics and in museum spaces, guide me in sharing an imaginary in which oral narratives and past, present, and future experiences coexist. The display of these apparitions-visions not only subverts the instrumentality of colonialist record-keeping but also issues a necessary challenge to the consequences of the distortive representations that have annulled our existence and history as a living people.
By reaffirming the unique experience of circular ritualization, I insist on dialoguing from the body, the land, and the knowledge that shape the becoming of Mapuche culture. This is a position of resistance that seeks to go beyond mere exercises of memory—toward a micropolitical, plural, and contestatory problematic. My aim is to challenge hegemonic discourses and the logic of exclusion-inclusion that continue to be a constant within art, cultural, and patrimonial institutions at a glocal level.
Photography: Fernando Melo
Biography of the Artist / Ñi Kimngeam Ineyngen Chi Artista
Francisco Huichaqueo (Wallmapu, Chile, 1977) is a Mapuche artist, filmmaker, and curator, as well as a professor at the School of Visual Arts at the University of Concepción. His work is characterized by a deep connection to the Mapuche worldview, focused on recovering, repairing, and empowering indigenous memory and culture. Through his artistic practices, Huichaqueo aims to challenge colonial narratives, promote cultural resistance, and strengthen the link with the land and ancestors.
Since 2011, he has been invited to exhibit and give lectures in various countries and cultural spaces worldwide. He has participated in prominent festivals and exhibitions such as the Smithsonian’s Mother Tongue Film Festival in Washington, D.C., ImagineNATIVE in Toronto, the Toulouse Film Festival, the Berlin Biennale, the Reina Sofía Museum in Madrid, and the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York. Additionally, he has conducted workshops and lectures at prestigious institutions in the United States and Europe, including Yale, Princeton, Berkeley, Brown University, the University of California in Berkeley, Stony Brook University, and New York University (NYU), as well as the University of Lüneburg, Germany, and the University of San Andrés in La Paz, Bolivia.
His career includes residencies in film and art in Taiwan (2015), France (2009), Colombia (2017), and Mexico (2018). In recognition of his work, in 2021 he received the Creation Award from the University of Concepción, and in 2022 he was nominated by the Cisneros Foundation (CIFO) for the grants and commissions program.
His most notable collective exhibitions include Chilean Miracle (2014, at the Human Resources Gallery, Los Angeles), De Celerate (2020, at the TETUHI Art Gallery, Auckland, New Zealand), On the Principle of Time (2021, at the Reina Sofía Museum, Madrid), and Reparation / Repair / Reparar, alongside artists Ángela Ferreira and Kader Attia, curated by Gabriela Salgado at the Hangar Art Research Center in Lisbon.
Among his individual works are Kalül Trawün (2010/2011, at the National Fine Arts Museum, Santiago), Wenu Pelon (2015/2021, at the Museum of Visual Arts, Santiago), Malón Wiño (2017, at the Matta Cultural Center, Buenos Aires), and Trig Metawe Kura (2022, at Palacio Pereira, Santiago). In 2024, he participated as a curator in the exhibition "Ancestors Today. Visual Stories of Migrant Women" at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, Connecticut, alongside the Arte Popular collective.
His key film works, listed chronologically, are Künü (2022), Women’s Spirit (2020), Kuifi Ül (2020), Ilwen – The Land Smells Like a Father (2013), and Mencer Ñi Pewma (2010). His films are part of collections such as the Chilean National Library, the University of Chile Library, and the Canadian distributor Vtape, based in Toronto.
He has been cited and published in various specialized magazines and books, including Artishok, Contemporary Art Magazine, Garland Magazine, Atlántica, Afterall Magazine, Concreta Revista de Arte Contemporáneo, and The Extractive Zone.
In 2023, he published The Image Before the Image in the book Encounters in Video Art in Latin America by the Getty Research Institute. In 2024, he released Trig Metawe: Repairing the Cracks of Dispossession for Küme Mongen in Countering Modernity: Communal and Cooperative Models from Indigenous Peoples, edited by C. Smith-Morris and C. Abadía-Barrero and published by Routledge.