Claudia Alarcón & Silät

Claudia Alarcón (b. 1989, Argentina) is an Indigenous textile artist from the La Puntana community of Wichí people of northern Salta. Alongside her individual practice, she leads the Silät collective, an organization of one hundred women weavers of different generations from Wichí communities in the Alto la Sierra and La Puntana region.

Wichí society is clan-based and matrilocal. Weaving with hand-spun vegetal fibers from the local chaguar plant has been a communal, female-led activity for centuries, and is fundamental to the visual culture, narrative history and economics of the Wichí people. The centrality of weaving to the Wichí communities is articulated in a mythological tale in which women, living in the sky as stars, would travel down to earth on woven chaguar ropes to dine on the fish caught by fishermen. Upon discovering this, the men employed the help of birds to snap the ropes and the women were trapped on earth for evermore but continued to weave and pass the knowledge from the world above onto their daughters. This parable suggests a passage from the naivety and freedom of childhood to the societal responsibilities of adulthood; girls are taught to spin chaguar and weave functional objects from the age of 12, their creations a way to provide financially as well as to sustain ancestral cultural practices. In another sense, learning to weave presents a further awakening, an entryway into a collective conversation between the women of the Wichí communities. The textiles, formed of geometric motifs drawn from the surrounding environment, are a method of communicating unspoken thoughts within a culture that highly values forms of non-verbal expression, and the messages found within dreams and subconscious intuition.