At a glance
Contemporary intervention · Indigenous and queer art · installation and multimedia.. Mapuche identity and colonial memory confront the Western tradition through a multimedia intervention that rethinks territory and the body within the museum galleries.
Meet the artist
Why go
This intervention disrupts the traditional museum narrative, offering a sharp perspective on how we perceive landscape and ownership through the lens of Indigenous and queer experiences.
You'll see
Multimedia installations · Mapuche cultural references · Water and territorial themes · Bodily imagery · Colonial critique
Pace of visit
The intervention is concentrated and intellectually dense, requiring focused attention despite its relatively small physical footprint.
Artlovers Tip
Before entering the gallery, look up the geographical context of the Cautín River in Chile to better understand the political stakes behind the artist's use of water imagery.
Inside the exhibition
Cautín — Seba Calfuqueo at the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid, Spain, brings a contemporary Mapuche perspective into one of Europe's most prominent collections of Western art. The installation uses multimedia elements to challenge established ideas of territory and identity within a historical institutional setting.
The presentation features a series of works that reference the Cautín River, using water as a central motif to discuss displacement and the physical body. Through installations that blend Indigenous history with queer practices, Calfuqueo critiques the colonial structures that have historically defined how land and landscape are represented in the traditional art canon.
By placing these works within the Thyssen, the exhibition creates a productive friction between the museum's historical narrative and living Indigenous memory. It offers a rare opportunity to see how contemporary South American activism uses the visual language of the body to reclaim narratives of ownership and environmental belonging.
Worth travelling for?
A focused, intellectually rigorous intervention that provides essential decolonial context for visitors interested in how contemporary Indigenous artists are reshaping traditional museum spaces.
Cautín — Seba Calfuqueo
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