La vida que explota
Curated by Andrei Fernández
MALBA-PUERTOS, Puertos
22 September 2024 – 2 March 2025

La vida que explota proposes a dialogue between the sculptural set of five anthropomorphized beings that Gabriel Chaile presented at the Venice Biennale in 2022, now exposed permanently in MALBA-PUERTOS, and the textile works of the wichi artist Claudia Alarcón and the collective of Silät weavers.

Chaile’s totemic creatures bear the names of his family members and are the result of a mutation process that begins with the fascination with the power of the image and the suggestion of the statuary language. Chaile recovers its origins in the form of monumental clay sculptures, artifacts that can also be lit, give heat and function as ovens that produce food.

In dialogue with these sculptures, pieces of textile art by the Salta artist Claudia Alarcón and the collective of weavers Silät, which brings together wichis women who fight for the defense of the collective memory and the creativity of their culture. These artists work the yarn of chaguar – a herbaceous plant with succulent and thorny leaves, distinctive of the Gran Chaco – with contemporary images and complex geometric assemblies. Chaguar textiles have long been circulating in cities in the form of bags, called yicas, and in recent years they have grown to be large cloths designed for contemplation and no longer for use.

The textile pieces link designs of the visual language of the Wichi people, which are interrupted and re-signified with explosions that are pronouncements of strength and joy that grow. They occupy the space in a new way, to reach what was previously snatched as a destination. Together with the creatures of Chaile, they propose to recover characters and stories that disobey the denials of memory imposed by coloniality.

Translated from Spanish

Photo by Santiago Orti and Diego Spivacov