Silät features in the 59th Carnegie International, the longest-running exhibition of international art in North America organized every four years by the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
Silät, translated from the Wichi language as "announcement," is a collective comprised of over 100 women weavers from Santa Victoria Este, a town located in the borderlands of three countries. The group is also part of the Unión Textiles Semillas, a larger organization of artists and activists from northwest Argentina that convenes itinerant schools centering the act of weaving in the exchange and custodianship of knowledge, memory, and purpose.
Led by artist Claudia Alarcón and curator Andrei Fernández, Silät presents Tewok: the river we weave (2026), an installation of 102 weavings, representing each member, made from natural and artificial dyes and a fiber of the bromeliad plant-called chaguar in Argentinian Spanish or cutsaj in the Wichí language. The installation borrows its title from the Wichi name for the Pilcomayo, a river that begins in the Bolivian Andes and winds back and forth across Paraguay's and Argentina's shared border. The forms and motifs that appear in each member's work are connected to what they know, remember, and wish to share about the river, while their mutual desire to create a forest of weavings, inspired by the ways in which trees grow, evokes the space where life unfolds on the ground.
"Wichi textiles have long been made to create bags in which geometries – named after animals and plants – become visible. These bags are known among Wichí communities as hilú, and in Argentina as yica, a word of Quechua origin. They carry ancestral knowledge about life and the relationships between living beings, which the hilú/yica holds and conveys. Wichí designs can be understood as ways of thinking made visible, carrying knowledge, tensions, and strategies of resistance and continuity in times of change and pressure. Each motif evokes beings of the forest, seen as protectors and teachers. In this installation, each member has woven a piece that begins as a bag, then opens and stretches into a larger whole-one that speaks in the visual language of Wichi weaving, holding ways of life and stories where human time and the natural world meet." – Andrei Fernández, curator and member of Silat
If the word we
59th Carnegie International
Organized by Ryan Inouye, Danielle A. Jackson, and Liz Park
The Carnegie Museum, Pittsburgh, PA
2 May 2026 - 3 January 2027
