Francisco Huichaqueo is a Mapuche artist, curator and filmmaker. His work deals with the reparation, restitution and agency of Mapuche heritage and memory. His decolonial interventions have been exhibited at international biennials and institutions such as the Berlin Biennial, the Havana Biennial and the Reina Sofía Museum. He has also shown his work in Chile, at the Museum of Visual Arts and the Museum of Pre-Columbian Art, among others, and at international film festivals such as the Toulouse Latin America Film Festival, the Toronto Imaginative Festival, the Morelia Festival in Mexico, the Mother Tongue Film Festival in Washington D.C., and the National Museum of the American Indian. He is currently a professor at the Faculty of Humanities and Arts at Chile’s Universidad de Concepción and a 2023-2024 visiting professor at the University of Connecticut’s Collective Healing Initiative.

During his visit to Lisbon, we spoke about the development of his practice and his mission with his community. Francisco explained some of the ways in which the Mapuche cosmovision manifests itself through his work and how this relates to some of the contemporary challenges the museum is facing as an institution. We opened our conversation surrounded by the sound of the “trutruca”, an ancient wind instrument ceremonially adopted by Mapuche communities to elicit calm, which greatly enlivened our dialogue.

MV: You have an extensive and internationally acknowledged practice, having presented your work in many different countries and collaborated with institutions in both the artistic and academic fields. If we take a look at the beginning of your journey, what was that first contact with artistic practice like?

FH: Actually, I never realised I had already started. It began when I worked in the garden with my father, the family garden. The major artistic experience has to do with those moments, with those space-times of growing food and getting the seeds in order. My first instinctive compositions, as a hand maker, and the acquisition of knowledge, were passed on to me by my father. I also learnt the language of space, of the earth. My father was extremely respectful of space and place, and he passed that on to me without even saying anything, just with bodily gestures and silence. If I had any questions, I’d ask in the morning and he would come and answer them in the afternoon. There was no need to fill the room with chatter. Human beings do not only speak verbally, there are other ways of communicating. When there is connection, a sheltered space is engendered. I often understood how my father was gently communicating to me at work and in his work.

In the 1980s, I tended to my small vegetable garden, tidying the soil and shaping the area before my father planted the seeds. My role was the same as that of many others in my small corner of the garden, against the backdrop of an economic and global crisis, both local and Chilean, faced with a dictatorship. Growing food was a must, not a romantic affair. But this need revealed the poetics implicit in nature, which I then codified into art language. My world was quite small, a very beautiful and protected place. I recall that my father would take me for walks by the river, where we would buy fish. And one day we spotted a gentleman painting a watercolour. He was an easel painter, the son of German settlers in Chile’s south. I had never seen a painter before and had no idea that there was such a thing as an artist. He was painting a watercolour in the rain. He stared at the blue mixture and sketched the sky he saw on the canvas. I told my father that I wanted to do that as I felt the image had power. I personally felt that this moment had a significant impact on me and I sensed that it was something I could not let go of, I somehow embraced it that day and never stopped since.

Where I came from, we made a distinction between those with educational and economic possibilities and us, the workers. Art was for white people. But I had a right too. With her special intuition, my mother took me to a music school funded by the local council. We got a grant, allowing me to learn European musical arts. This is how I came to experience feelings that were inside me and that somehow became positively integrated, letting me see the world with a background soundtrack while I worked in the vegetable garden at home. With time, I bought a personal stereo and listened to music while watering the garden. This cultural pairing was my school. I later became aware of it and started painting, mimicking the watercolour painter and emulating the great masters. My mother bought me an art book, which she paid for in ten months, and I learnt the whole of it by heart. I painted by candlelight during the blackouts, which led to something interesting. I found this passion in southern Chile.

MV: Following these first encounters not only with artistic practice, but also with Western epistemologies, what was the process like of reconnecting with your Mapuche origins and knowledge?

FH: It was always a struggle to reconnect with the Mapuche in a context of Western influences. I remember that it hit us hard among the polarities that kept us apart. We endured racism because of our indigenous names and were discriminated against both at school and in society.

My mother isn’t Mapuche; my father is. This brought us discrimination in the family and in the community. My father was told one day that we would have to change our Mapuche surname to avoid bullying, but he also said he would never do it, that we had to take what was given to us with pride. That day, I think I came to my original awareness and little by little I began to sculpt my pride and lift the social veil of discrimination that persists in Chile. Discrimination is still fierce, but our bravery and the acquisition of tools have allowed us to wake up and carefully make decisions. I became aware that we were a great people, we had lost a lot but we had kept our cosmovision a secret. Now, whilst many members of the community have converted to the gospel, we maintain a worldview that acts as an ancestral binding that helps us not to completely lose what is ours. This is where the process of returning to our roots is lived and welcomed. This message also applies to different groups. The Mapuche people share a special connection, manifested in dreams, which we regularly exchange in the mornings at breakfast to clarify their interpretation through Mapuche intuition.

And the art gradually found its way into my physical and spiritual body with the tools that the territory provides, and I proudly took it on as a life mission. I have faced difficult and challenging times, but also Mapuche spiritual experiences that are extremely valuable to me. The Mapuche world has many new tools and we use them as a means of sowing these messages, often of resistance. We do not want to impose them, we just want people to know them and become aware of them.

MV: You mentioned cine-medicine when you spoke about your life mission. How do you define and characterise this cinema? How does it relate to the museum?

FH: We Mapuche men and women, children, old men and women have different missions in life. Mine was art, which I saw as a means of reclaiming our stolen millenary culture. This plunder disrupted our flow of creative and spiritual autonomy. In modern society, I want to salvage and repair this historical rupture of our people. I have made films and exhibitions differently to step in and restore our memory, presenting my film work as “cine-medicine”, and this became my motivation.

The colonial museum’s condition suffers from insufficient understanding because, based on its rationale, it neglects the spiritual feeling which is primordial when expressing art and, above all, when exhibiting art that has been stolen from the world’s indigenous groups. When I analyse the state of museums, with their debates concerning our memory, I can see that they are in deep darkness as there are cracks and grief over the theft of our ill-managed and misinterpreted memory. So I put myself out there, using modern tools like film, music and poetry to heal from the inside out. I see modern culture as a vessel broken by colonial history. To repair it, we need to act from the inside out, as a healing repair operation, and introduce this tenderness into modern culture by rebuffing the denial of our sovereignty by neo-colonial states. This urgent mission must be carried out by everyone with conscience.

MV: Continuing on the subject of cine-medicine, can we talk a bit about the mission of the film CHI RÜTRAM AMULNIEI ÑI RÜTRAM / The metal keeps talking?

FH: This film comes from a very specific context, as it was shot in a museum, a colonial one, where our heritage and memory are stored. As museum people say, they are held on trust, right? How do they say it? In custody. But we have never approved this custody. These films were made for a Mapuche exhibition in a pre-Columbian museum in Santiago, where all things Mapuche are held in vaults behind glass cases.

On this occasion, in a Mapuche territorial expansion, as I like to call it, led by a Mapuche platera, her disciple and I, we succeeded in exhibiting contemporary Mapuche art, with 370 handmade pieces. The exhibition included a large water fountain with natural herbs called “Menoko”, pieces that had been submerged in water and others suspended above it. We have installed photographic archives of Mapuche people punished by the colonial lash. These fresh films provide a voice for Mapuche artists Clorinda Antinao and Antonio Chiwaicura in their territory. This film was made to give context to these people’s roots and origins, and to explain the reasons for their work as natural heirs to Mapuche jewellery. The West calls it jewellery. We call it a gift, because each gift has a spiritual purpose and is used by Mapuche people in spiritual contexts.

During the inauguration, a large ceremony took place, one that began on a hill in Santiago called “Wanglen”, which means star. There was a march from Santiago’s Mapuche community to the museum. I silently waited with the Mapuche authority to welcome the artists and the community to the museum’s opening. We unveiled it with a large crowd, following our protocol, on the grounds of resisting and restoring the unbalanced. The Mapuche delivered speeches for the first time, which made our message clear. The museum is facing the challenge of how to keep this going. Although we have less power, we keep trying and resisting for historical justice to be done.

That same day, the exhibitor Clorinda Antinao read the word “curator” next to my name in the exhibition credits. I answered that I did not fully understand, but she said: “You are, for you are curating a Mapuche condition”. And that day I understood my role as a curator, a Mapuche curator. This is different, because curating is understood from a different angle. These tangible actions in museums, which I also call territorial expansions or missions, serve as an antidote to cure the colonial museum, they are cures, they are medicine.

The curator is the one who tends, who mends the scar, who breathes the medicine. This is why I also make films. After all, in cinema, the image is blown into people’s eyes. And its substance helps to internalise and restore the ancestral territory of the Mapuche people. If we present footage of the rivers, the wind, the sound of the birds, the seas, or the power of the stone, the rains and the Mapuche hymns, these act like medicine on the human being, welcoming it like the breath of a “machi” or spiritual guide.

MV: What if we shift slightly to one of your most recent films, TRALKAN KURA / Thunder Stone, so that you can speak briefly about its mission?

FH: Sure. In the film Thunder Stone, Mapuche knowledge discusses the power of stones. I’m still learning, as this knowledge has been concealed for a long time. My name, Huichaqueo, means raised stone or stone axe, a flint once used as a war axe, which also has an ancient family connection.

I was lucky enough that this film was shot in the ancestral territory of my political relatives, on a mission to support another exhibition in a Santiago museum. This is a restored palace belonging to an old wealthy family from the early twentieth century. The tensions at this museum were over how to display the old Mapuche gifts outside the display cases. Obviously, conservation protocols do not allow this, but I pleaded for us to be granted freedom of representation. This is how we exhibited our tangible memory freely, along with a water slope called a “menoko” where medicinal herbs grow, with an elevation of a “rewe” or ceremonial medicinal area, made by people who can do this. I cannot do it by myself, but working together builds collective authorship. I represent this collective in it.

The film is played by a boy who performs a Mapuche dance, and he decides to do so in a territorial site belonging to his grandparents, which has been affected by a monoculture enterprise. He dances in the spot under the promise that this mission, in his words, will travel to other parts of the world as a testimony. And I gave him my word. Yesterday I wrote to his father to tell him that this work is on display here in Lisbon and continues to journey around the world as we agreed before he came.

Thunder stones, as ancient knowledge has it, come from space or volcanoes, fall incandescently and are buried in specific places, often near beaches. Some are meteorites with exceptional magnetism and are collected for their healing properties to cure bodily pains, as well as having particular roles in Mapuche society. This is what I know about stones. This is knowledge that I’ve been acquiring over the last few years. Life has led me to this knowledge of what is ours. Then thunder rings out in the film. Thunder heals the land of the boy’s grandparents and sorts out thoughts.