CAUTÍN
October 6, 2026–January 17, 2027
Organized by TBA21 and Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza.
Produced in collaboration with Centro Cultural La Moneda, Santiago, Chile.
Curated by Marina Avia Estrada, Director of Exhibitions & Public Programs at TBA21.
In Mapuche thought, the lewfü, or river, is a living presence through which force, memory, and spiritual knowledge articulate a territory. The lewfü is a system capable of maintaining balance and reacting to environmental changes. That intelligence shapes the interactions between the numerous life forms that embody CAUTÍN, the first solo exhibition in Europe by Mapuche artist Seba Calfuqueo, presented by TBA21 Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary and the Thyssen-Bornemisza National Museum.
Calfuqueo approaches the Cautín River—a key axis of the Wallmapu, the ancestral territory of the Mapuche people—as a relational field in which water, land, animals, plants, spirits, infrastructures, and human communities continually constitute one another. Rooted in Mapuche philosophy and the principle of itrofill mongen (all forms of life without exception), this conception distributes agency across all entities that compose the Cautín. This relational ontology has been subjected to material and epistemic violence, as Spanish colonization and the Chilean occupation of Wallmapu transformed the Cautín into an economic resource. Even so, the transformation of the lewfü does not erase the relations that comprise the Cautín as a living territory for the Mapuche people: as it changes, these are altered and recomposed, giving rise to mixed forms of life and sites of political and existential conflict.
The artist works within this contested terrain, responding through a materially hybrid practice. What Calfuqueo calls travesti materials oppose colonial demands for purity and authenticity. In CAUTÍN, Calfuqueo works across textile paintings, ceramics, 3D animation, performance, hair-based installation, videoperformance, and other artistic forms to create an assemblage whose coherence emerges from the relational fabric of itrofill mongen. The resulting work holds heterogeneous histories and cosmovisions in unresolved relation. The Cautín’s course also structures the exhibition, serving as a way to trace the memories and conflicts carried by its current. In Seba Calfuqueo's words: "the exhibition begins at the river’s mouth—where fresh water meets salt water—and reaches its source, located on a volcano. This intentionally evokes a movement against the natural course of the river." CAUTÍN is a circular journey based on the non-linear conception of time in Mapuche philosophy, where history is not understood chronologically, and water has neither beginning nor end, but moves in cycles. By tracing the Cautín upstream, Calfuqueo turns its countercurrent into the exhibition’s method. The resulting cycle keeps histories of colonial violence and Mapuche resistance in motion, together with the lewfü in all of its complexity.
As drought, extractive pressure, and unresolved Indigenous land-and-water conflicts push water governance to the center of global politics—Chile still reckoning with the legacy of its 1981 Water Code even after the 2022 reform, and the UN pressing the state in 2025 on Mapuche peoples' rights to land and safe water in Wallmapu—CAUTÍN arrives as a demonstration that a river is not a resource to be divided into governable units but a living, knowledge-bearing relation. It also lands as leading museums and biennials have pivoted toward Indigenous authorship, relational ecologies, and the rights of nature, which places Calfuqueo's Mapuche cosmology at the leading edge of contemporary art's reassessment of agency across human and more-than-human worlds. The exhibition is the culmination of more than two years of artistic and documentary research and displays several series of all newly produced works. Thus, CAUTÍN extends a line of inquiry that TBA21 has pursued for more than two decades through artist commissions and the work of TBA21–Academy, engaging with situated epistemologies sustained by the communities most profoundly connected to watery worlds.
About Seba Calfuqueo
Seba Calfuqueo (b. 1991, Santiago, Chile) is a Mapuche visual artist who combines hybrid disciplines to present a syncretic vision of the natural, the geological, and the cosmic. Her work is held in collections such as Tate Modern and Centre Pompidou, and has been exhibited at the Venice Biennale. In 2026, W-galería’s solo presentation of her work received the Focus Stand Prize at Frieze New York. She has spent more than a decade exploring the tensions between Mapuche identity and memory, often moving away from idealized visions of Indigenous territories to address their hybrid, complex realities.
Find out more about TBA21’s program at tba21.org.
