¿CHUMAL ELKANIENGEAL? (Why keep it?)

(2022) 3D animation and archives, 11 minutes

This project goes through different visual and narrative registers that invite us to think about a critical history of collecting and its relationship with the Mapuche world.

Through the connection with the Museo Chileno de Arte Precolombino, the artist approached their collection of Mapuche pieces, such as: kolong, kütru metawe, trarüwe, tüpu, pifüllka. By means of the 3D photometry technique, it is possible to look at the objects in a different way, without the glass interfering in the interaction with the pieces. These images are created by intervening their museum record, digitally imbuing them with blue, the sacred color of the Mapuche people.

The work addresses various contrasts of the pieces, their implications in the community, their political and historical aspects. Pieces as treasure, pieces as relics, pieces as a manifestation of social power, pieces unanchored from their diversity of purposes due to an exhibition order. Through advertisements; bilingual Mapuche sources; intervened photographs of their possible uses and disuses; along with research of Mapuche collections in international museums, we can reflect on what these pieces tell us as objects that have become subjects. A trarüwe devoid of its ornamental condition, a trarüwe as the materialization of Mapuche writing. A kolong sustained in an ancient voice expressing the vivacity of its genius. A pifüllka critical of monoculture. A kütru metawe traversing binarisms. A tüpu narrating cross-border regireferences.

In sum, ¿chumal elkaniengeal / ¿para qué guardar? offers itself as an intervention to put ourselves in the objects’ place, on the other side of the vitrine.