The ancestral power of the act of weaving lies at the core of the work of Claudia Alarcón & Silät, a collective of weavers from the Wichí people. Formed in 2023, the group today comprises more than one hundred women who live in the communities of La Puntana and Alto La Sierra, in the northern region of the province of Salta, Argentina. Their works are produced using chaguar fibers, a bromeliad native to the region, renowned for the resilience of its fibers.

Silät emerged from a series of workshops that proposed rethinking the formats of yica bags, an object central to Wichí culture. Yicas feature geometric motifs that refer to animals and plants from the region. While this tradition serves as the point of departure for the work of Alarcón & Silät, their pieces move beyond this established repertoire. Under Alarcón’s leadership, the collective developed techniques that allow textiles to be worked on by more than one weaver at a time, emphasizing notions of collective construction and authorship. In a poetic manner, they combine within a single piece different patterns and references drawn from the artists’ universe, their mythology, and their territory: autumn and winter, the nightly thread, the hovering of the winds, the invented paths, the star-women, the memories and scars, what is heard on the monte. In this way, a body of work that appears abstract and geometric takes on deeply poetic and life-filled connotations.

Living, Weaving—the subtitle of the exhibition at MASP—underscores an understanding of weaving as a continuous act, a practice that spans generations and is integrated into the movement of life itself. Preserving this practice is, in itself, an act of courage. Reinventing it is an act of boldness.

Claudia Alarcón & Silät: Living, Weaving is curated by Adriano Pedrosa, Artistic Director, and Laura Cosendey, Assistant Curator, MASP.

The exhibition is part of the year dedicated to Latin American Histories, which includes solo shows by Carolina Caycedo, Colectivo Acciones de Arte, Damián Ortega, Jesús Soto, La Chola Poblete, Manuel Herreros de Lemos, Mateo Manaure Arilla, Pablo Delano, Rosa Elena Curruchich, Sandra Gamarra Heshiki, Santiago Yahuarcani, and Sol Calero, as well as the group exhibition Latin American Histories, and shows in the Video Room by Clara Ianni, Claudia Martínez Garay, Edgar Calel, Oscar Muñoz, and Regina José Galindo.