Seba Calfuqueo. CAUTÍN

A river that springs from the sea. A river that is earth, tiny endangered frogs, rocks, narrowleaf plantain, guardian spirits. A river that is a gathering place. A river whose mouth is in the heavens.

Few rivers shape a territory as profoundly as the Cautín shapes the Araucanía. A region within Wallmapu—the native lands of the Mapuche people—, which wave after wave of colonizing ambitions have attempted to reduce to a mere extractive resource, ignoring and attacking its inhabitants’ beliefs and ways of life. This economic and epistemic violence has manifested in evangelizing missions, in the fragmentation and usurpation of the land, and in the privatization of water. In response, Mapuche communities and territories have devised forms of resistance supported by a network of situated knowledge and reciprocal relationships, where all forces are living, sovereign, and interdependent and where separating water from land is inconceivable. This state of belonging and uprootedness is summarized in a verse by Daniel Catrileo: “we are exile in the homeland of the river.”

This exhibition presents the river not as a watercourse but as an intelligent territory made up of rocks, guardian spirits, sand, animals, plants, and human beings. The artist Seba Calfuqueo acts as a translator of these life forces, arbitrating between their different modes of expression. In CAUTÍN, the river’s languages manifest in different forms and moments: zoomorfic pottery decorated with polluting materials; animated videos that revisit Mapuche origin stories; embroidered paintings that use historical records to rewrite the territory; drone footage that maps and reshapes our understanding of the river. Calfuqueo’s bridge-body is also part of this intricate tapestry, inhabiting the exhibition as just another language within a champurria space—once a derogatory term used for mixed Mapuche and wingka (foreign) heritage, but now redefined as a positive assertion of multiple, entwined identity—.

CAUTÍN does not subscribe to the idyllic, moralizing perception—constructed by religious tradition and Romantic imagery—of water as a space of purification; instead, it presents the river as a hybrid and choral locus, a murky sacred space whose power lies in the celebration of impurity, at once moving current and stagnant swamp. That tension, the flow of heterogeneous and often contradictory forces, is the source of both resistance and balance, bringing forth creativity and life. The same tension permeates and structures this exhibition: a cyclical, upstream journey where the river is more than just water and does not spring from the mountains, the territory is dislocated but not fragmented, and the different languages feed off each other without losing their voices.

CAUTÍN is an exhibition organized by TBA21 Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary and the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, produced in collaboration with Centro Cultural La Moneda. All works in the show are new pieces commissioned by TBA21.

Sebastiana (Seba) Calfuqueo (Santiago de Chile, 1991) is a Mapuche trans artist whose practice questions the mainstream narrative created by colonial processes and their impact on contemporary Indigenous and Western societies. She is a curator at Espacio218, member of the Mapuche collective Rangiñtulewfü, and Yene magazine contributor.

Her work has won international acclaim and received numerous distinctions, including the Cuervo Prize at Zona Maco (2024), awards from Fundación Ama Amoedo (2024) and Fundación FAVA (2018), and an Eyebeam Fractal Fellowship (2020). She has been a guest artist at the Venice Biennale (2024), the Whitney Biennial (2024), the São Paulo Biennial (2021), the Mercosul Biennial (2020), and the Paiz Art Biennial (2025, 2020). Her work can be found in the Tate Modern (United Kingdom), Centre Pompidou (France), Denver Art Museum (United States), Museo MALBA (Argentina), TBA21 Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, KADIST Collection (France), Museu de Arte Contemporânea do Rio Grande do Sul (Brazil), Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes (Chile), and MAC (Chile), among other major international collections.