Seba Calfuqueo. Cautín

Few rivers shape a territory the way the Cautín shapes the Araucanía, a region belonging to the Wallmapu -the ancestral land of the Mapuche people-, a place marked by successive colonial projects that have sought to reduce it to an extractive resource: from the early evangelizing missions to the contemporary process of water privatization. Thus, the Cautín River is not—in the first solo exhibition in Europe by Mapuche artist Seba Calfuqueo (Santiago, Chile, 1991), presented by the museum and TBA21—a simple watercourse, but a living, complex territory composed of rocks and sand, animals and plants, protective spirits and human beings. 

The show is the result of years of research into this river, in which Calfuqueo acts as a translator of the forces that inhabit it, giving them form through different languages: zoomorphic ceramics representing endemic species decorated with synthetic materials, video animations revisiting foundational narratives of the Mapuche people, and embroidered paintings that rewrite the region drawing on historical archives and local flora. Woven through all of this is the artist's own body, present in the exhibition through a video performance. 

The exhibition proposes a cyclical, countercurrent journey that invites us to rethink our relationship with water and territory. Against the vision of the river as a mere natural resource separated from the land, Cautín unfolds a hybrid space where the sacred and the impure coexist, where the tension between heterogeneous forces generates balance, creativity, and life. A river born in the ocean. A river that is land, tiny frogs, sharp rocks, ribwort plantain, protective spirits. A river that is a place of gathering. A river that flows into the sky. 

Cautín is an exhibition by TBA21 Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary and the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, produced in collaboration with the Centro Cultural La Moneda (Santiago de Chile). All works in the exhibition are new commissions by TBA21. 

Marina Avia Estrada, exhibition curator.