Francisco Huichaqueo (Mapuche) studied documentary filmmaking at the Escuela de Cine de Chile. In addition to being a filmmaker, Francisco is a curator of video art, animation and experimental films and currently teaches animation and experimental video at the Universidad de Chile in Santiago.

My work with images, sounds and the intervention of space consists of creating a bridge that connects my art with Mapuche knowledge and spirituality. This connection is not static, it began as a search for points of contact and has developed in the last decade into a ritual practice.

My main means of expression is the camera. I don’t use it only as a recording device, but also as a tool which in terms of expression is as pictorial as the brush. I often start from the materiality of painting towards a kinesthesia where moving images invite the audience to experience trance. This trance is not a symptom or a passing experience, it is rather a state that involves language, the body and consciousness, especially in cultures that search the sacred through orality.

I belong to a generation of video artists that emerged in the 2000s in Chile. I participate as a painter, filmmaker and as an indigenous artist. My work in videoart, installation, and performance draws on Mapuche cultural practices. My art and ritual points in three directions at the same time. In the first place, I strive to open a space for observing and participating in a Mapuche ceremonial. Second, memory, conjugated in the present tense, is set in motion as if it were a living and inhabitable substratum. Thirdly, my work resembles a premonition in the sense that it’s shaped like an arrow soaring into the future.

My most immediate motivations question the representation of my culture and of other indigenous peoples by different institutional discourses, especially museography. My goal is to rethink the asymmetric relationship between cultures that share a natural and political territory. On the one hand, with an art capable of crafting experiences where the audience has contact with the perspective and worldview of the original peoples and the first nations. On the other hand, stimulate and revive the indigenous memory of the Mapuche people using innovative multimedia.

Artist Code: 1038