Claudia Alarcón & Silät: Choreography of the Imagination

Cecilia Brunson Projects presents Choreography of the Imagination, an exhibition of new works by the leading Indigenous artist collective Claudia Alarcón & Silät (founded 2023, Salta province, Argentina). The exhibition features textiles woven from the hand-spun fibres of the chaguar plant, a material and practice deeply rooted in the culture of the Wichí people of the Argentinian Gran Chaco. Claudia Alarcón & Silät’s weavings, celebrated in the 2024 Venice Biennale, are fluid and rhythmic abstractions that echo ancestral geometries and stories, and tie the weavers into dynamic imaginaries, connecting them to past generations.

Claudia Alarcón is an Indigenous artist from the La Puntana community of Wichí people. Working with curator Andrei Fernández, she leads Silät, a collective of over one hundred women weavers spanning generations from the Alto la Sierra and La Puntana Wichí communities. Weaving with chaguar has been a communal and female-led activity for centuries, and a vital channel of non-verbal expression within Wichí culture, the weavings considered a method of communicating unspoken thoughts and messages.

Exploring the possibilities of artmaking within and beyond these traditions, Silät give new strength to this form of creativity and communication, while Alarcón leads the revival of ancestral and ceremonial stitches such as the ‘antique stitch’ central to this exhibition. Additionally, the collective practice fosters autonomy and economic self-sufficiency amongst women across the Gran Chaco, living in precarity against the dual threats of cultural erasure and climate crisis.

Claudia Alarcón & Silät’s weavings form a meaningful contribution to the rich tradition of geometric abstraction in South America, but also to the strand of art history built upon the continent’s textile practices, which includes European and North American modernists such as Josef and Anni Albers and Sheila Hicks. Anni Albers engaged with these same Wichí traditions in the 1950s: she held chaguar textiles from Salta in her personal collection, from which she extracted geometric principles and weaving techniques as she developed her own pioneering practice, and featured the material in her seminal volume On Weaving (1965).

Anni Albers’ encounter with chaguar weaving in the 20th century has become a subject of interest for Alarcón. Opening the collective’s practice to the influence of Albers’ work, Alarcón invites critical reflection on the flow of influence and the enduring fascination with indigenous visual cultures. Embracing this ambivalence and nurturing an indirect relationship with Albers, Claudia Alarcón & Silät celebrate the habitual return to pre-Columbian geometries as fertile ground for experimentation, in resistance to viewing these as static and anonymous traditions.

In the collective’s second exhibition at Cecilia Brunson Projects, they reflect on lineage and evolution – strengthening an ancestral bond in the repetition of intricate gestures, while breaking with traditional patterns and embracing the new forms that appear in their work, a contemporary expression of Wichí culture.

The exhibition coincides with the collective’s first institutional solo show, titled Tayhin, at the De La Warr Pavilion in the UK (14 June – 14 September 2025).

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