Callana, the skin mark which names us when born as that ‘other body’, as that ‘other race’, as that reflection that I cannot see if not through an ‘other’. Castro Hueche

For indigenous peoples, place, land, sovereignty, and memory matter. Jodi Byrd

Called to experience the skin as a territory upon which power is exerted, the exhibition Callana: marked body invites us to wander and enter into the strangeness of a non-place. Among urban vestiges and the rubble of official discourses which blur the colonial fictions of progress, appears both the ruka (dwelling) and the land, the space for celebratory mourning, renovation and transformation of life.

Through the assemblage of objects, video-performance and installation, Castro Hueche reflects upon the necropolitics which the State of Chile exerts  against identities and corporalities of the Mapuche people, as ungrievable bodies. In our contemporary world, the politics of death is the power which dictates who can live and who must die; these are forms of subjugation held upon the assumption that some lives have more value than others.

Provoked by the consequences of the Military Occupation of the Wallmapu (1851-1883), the territorial dispossession and the forced migration of the Mapuche People, Castro Hueche’s work reflects the pride of being Mapuche and appeals  to the ancient mandate of returning to our tuwün or place of origin. The eternal return to the mapu (land) makes itself present through symbols and tributes, actions which are inscribed onto the skin of familiar objects and materialities, constantly returning to the body to reclaim existence.

Callana presents works which are hybrid objects, furniture that transfigure into dignified presences in an oneiric narrative. Found objects in vacant lots, fragmented, abandoned and marginated bodies are coated with new flesh  revealing their intimate structures and persisting in an anti-systemic stubbornness.

Castro Hueche found in furniture a subject of similarity that  returns his gaze back. Made from the same wood,  flesh and bone, pu ngen (spiritual presences) bearers of a text-orality which reflect ancient modes of making and a practice of silent resistance that collects, assembles and rebuilds a transcultural imaginary of identities in Wallmapu. 

Claudia Huenchuleo