This is one of the most significant works Claudia Alarcón and the women of Silät have produced, and was presented at Frieze Masters in 2025. It marks an important moment in Alarcón’s practice, when her individual artistic language becomes fully integrated with the collective practice of her community. For this reason, the work carries not only Claudia Alarcón’s name, but also that of Silät.

The work is woven from chaguar, a plant fibre fundamental to Wichí textile traditions. The fibre is gathered, processed and spun by hand, and its colours are created using natural dyes derived from local plants and barks, which vary according to what is available seasonally. Weaving therefore connects ancestral knowledge and origin stories with the rhythms and necessities of contemporary everyday life.

What makes this particular composition so remarkable is the monumental horizontal pattern running through its centre. This motif traditionally appears on yicas, the small woven bags made and used by Wichí women for carrying, exchanging and selling goods. Their characteristic palette of browns, reds and yellows can still be recognised here. In this work, however, Claudia and Silät radically enlarge the pattern, transforming something associated with an intimate, utilitarian object into the central structure of a large-scale abstract composition. Around it, geometric fields, zigzags and blocks of colour create a complex and highly experimental visual language.

There is also an extraordinary connection to the history of twentieth-century abstraction. Wichí yicas featuring closely related patterns appear in Anni Albers’s landmark 1965 publication On Weaving. Albers herself collected examples of these textiles during her travels in Latin America in the 1950s. Seen in this context, Our United Fabrics creates a fascinating reversal: a textile tradition that helped inform the language and thinking of modernist abstraction is brought back to the centre and articulated by Wichí women themselves.

The title, Our United Fabrics, is therefore particularly meaningful. The work brings together ancestral knowledge, everyday life, collective authorship and the history of abstraction. It asserts that these patterns are not simply formal motifs, but part of a living cultural language, one that continues to evolve through the collective practice of Claudia Alarcón and Silät.