Claudia Alarcón & Silät Argentina

Works
  • Claudia Alarcón & Silät, Installation view, 60th International Exhibition of la Biennale di Venezia, 2024
    Claudia Alarcón & Silät
    Installation view, 60th International Exhibition of la Biennale di Venezia, 2024
  • Claudia Alarcón & Silät, Installation view, 60th International Exhibition of la Biennale di Venezia, 2024
    Claudia Alarcón & Silät
    Installation view, 60th International Exhibition of la Biennale di Venezia, 2024
  • Claudia Alarcón & Silät, Ifwala [El día / The day], 2023
    Claudia Alarcón & Silät
    Ifwala [El día / The day], 2023
    Hand-spun chaguar fibre, natural dyes and aniline dyes, woven fabric, "yica" stitch
    Framed: 129.5 x 141 cm (51 x 55 1/2 in)
    Unframed: 105 x 108 cm (41 3/8 x 42 1/2 in)
  • Claudia Alarcón & Silät, Wenachelamejen [Lo diferente / The Other], 2025
    Claudia Alarcón & Silät
    Wenachelamejen [Lo diferente / The Other], 2025
    Hand-spun chaguar fibre, woven in yica stitch
    Framed: 159.5 x 152 cm (62 3/4 x 59 7/8 in)
    Unframed: 137 x 115 cm (54 x 45 1/4 in)
    Signed bottom right
  • Claudia Alarcón & Silät, Installation view, Claudia Alarcón & Silät: Choreography of the Imagination, Cecilia Brunson Projects, 2025
    Claudia Alarcón & Silät
    Installation view, Claudia Alarcón & Silät: Choreography of the Imagination, Cecilia Brunson Projects, 2025
  • Claudia Alarcón & Silät, El atardecer en tiempo de calor [Sunset in hot weather], 2025
    Claudia Alarcón & Silät
    El atardecer en tiempo de calor [Sunset in hot weather], 2025
    Hand-spun chaguar fibre, woven in yica stitch
    Framed: 176 x 186.5 cm (69 1/4 x 73 3/8 in)
    Unframed: 165 x 144 cm (65 x 56 3/4 in)
    Signed bottom right
  • Claudia Alarcón & Silät, Installation view, La Vida que Explota: Claudia Alarcón & Silät and Gabriel Chaile, MALBA-Puertos, 2024-25
    Claudia Alarcón & Silät
    Installation view, La Vida que Explota: Claudia Alarcón & Silät and Gabriel Chaile, MALBA-Puertos, 2024-25
  • Claudia Alarcón & Silät, Installation view, La Vida que Explota: Claudia Alarcón & Silät and Gabriel Chaile, MALBA-Puertos, 2024-25
    Claudia Alarcón & Silät
    Installation view, La Vida que Explota: Claudia Alarcón & Silät and Gabriel Chaile, MALBA-Puertos, 2024-25
  • Claudia Alarcón & Silät, La estrella descendiente [The falling star], 2024
    Claudia Alarcón & Silät
    La estrella descendiente [The falling star], 2024
    Hand-spun chaguar fibre, woven in yica stitch
    Unframed: 267 x 170 cm (105 1/8 x 66 7/8 in)
    Signed bottom right
  • Claudia Alarcón & Silät, Inawop [La primavera / Spring], 2023
    Claudia Alarcón & Silät
    Inawop [La primavera / Spring], 2023
    Hand-spun chaguar fibre, natural dyes and aniline dyes, woven fabric, "yica" stitch
    Framed: 177 x 135 cm (69 3/4 x 53 1/8 in)
    Unframed: 159 x 104 cm (62 5/8 x 41 in)
  • Claudia Alarcón & Silät, Installation view, Nitsäyphä: Wichí Stories, Cecilia Brunson Projects, 2023
    Claudia Alarcón & Silät
    Installation view, Nitsäyphä: Wichí Stories, Cecilia Brunson Projects, 2023
  • Claudia Alarcón & Silät, Okajhiaj [Un paisaje de felicidad / A landscape of happiness], 2024
    Claudia Alarcón & Silät
    Okajhiaj [Un paisaje de felicidad / A landscape of happiness], 2024
    Hand-spun chaguar fibre, woven in 'yica' stitch
    Unframed: 152 x 150 cm (59 7/8 x 59 in)
    Signed
Overview

Claudia Alarcón (b. 1989, Argentina) is an indigenous textile artist from the La Puntana community of Wichí people of northern Salta. Alongside her individual practice, she leads the Silät collective (formed in 2023), an organisation of one hundred women weavers of different generations from the Alto la Sierra and La Puntana Wichí communities.

 

Wichí society is clan-based and matrilocal. Weaving with hand-spun vegetal fibres from the local chaguar plant has been a communal, female-led activity for centuries, and is fundamental to the visual culture, narrative history and economics of the Wichí people. Its centrality is articulated in a mythological tale, in which beautiful women, living in the sky as stars, would travel down to earth on woven chaguar ropes to dine on the fish caught by fishermen. Upon discovering this, the men employed the help of birds to snap the ropes and the women were trapped on earth for evermore, but continued to weave and pass the knowledge from the world above onto their daughters. The parable suggests a passage from the naivety and freedom of childhood to the societal responsibilities of adulthood; girls are taught to spin chaguar and weave functional objects from the age of 12, their creations a way to provide financially as well as to sustain ancestral cultural practices. In another sense, learning to weave presents a further awakening, an entryway into a collective conversation between the women of the Wichí communities; the textiles, formed of geometric motifs drawn from the surrounding environment, are a method of communicating unspoken thoughts within a culture that values highly forms of non-verbal expression, and the messages found within dreams and subconscious intuition. Silät, the name adopted by the artist collective, means ‘information’ or ‘alert,’ and reflects the role of their textiles to convey messages and a shared cultural sentiment.

 

The Silät collective emerged from the Thañí/Viene del monte organization, a wider public project aimed at reviving ancestral textile traditions across the Salta region. Coordinated by Alarcón and working closely with curator Andrei Fernández since 2015, Silät explore the possibilities of artmaking within and beyond these traditions. The collective have evolved established techniques into new forms, producing large-scale images that exploit the textural intricacies and earthy colours of chaguar yarn and natural dyes. In coordinating the production of the Silät collective, and leading experimentations in material and subject matter within their practice, Alarcón supports creativity, independence and self-sustaining practices, and provides a means for women across generations to transmit a contemporary indigenous culture into the webs of international art dialogues, beyond ethnographic readings.

 

Claudia Alarcón & Silät’s work was featured in the 60th International Exhibition of the Venice Biennale, Stranieri Ovunque – Foreigners Everywhere in 2024 and the Mercosul Biennial, Porto Alegre in 2025. In December 2022, Alarcón became the first indigenous woman to be awarded a National Salon of Visual Arts prize by the Ministry of Culture in Argentina. Claudia Alarcón & Silät’s work is represented in public collections including LACMA, Los Angeles, Museu de arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand (MASP), MALBA Collection in Buenos Aires, the Denver Art Museum, Colorado, the Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minnesota, and the Gund Collection.

 

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Learn more about Claudia Alarcón & Silät's participation in the Venice Biennale

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