Cities have always been the scene of racialised forms of dispossession and expropriation. In Latin American urban contexts, colonial continuity shapes codes and aesthetics that are embodied in built forms that often disguise spatial practices of whitening.
In these contexts, racial issues have long been silenced, and even the emphasis that neoliberal multiculturalism has placed on concepts such as “ethnicity” and “culture” has contributed to the invisibility of these processes and inequalities. However, “whiteness” continues to represent the reference point against which other identities and belongings are produced, incorporating privilege and power.
Santiago is an excellent location for critically reflecting on whiteness in urban contexts as an impure and unstable category that is historically changing and ambiguous. By focusing on the architecture and materiality of the centre of Santiago, the project interrogates some of the critical objects through which imperial histories continue to shape experiences, everyday lives, and collective trajectories, while proposing alternatives for thinking about the city.
For these reasons, artist-researchers developed a collaboration at geographical and disciplinary crossings, collaboratively and critically addressing the question of whiteness through artistic interventions and digital technology.
Blanquitud
January 2024 – October 2024, Sheffield + Santiago
The project investigates ideologies of whiteness, their relationship with urban socio-material spaces and Indigenous counter-narratives an interdisciplinary research project involving social anthropology, urban studies, architecture, history and art, in collaboration with the Mapuche Indigenous organisation and theatre company Colectivo Epew.
From an anti-racist and anti-colonial stance, the project aims to make visible processes of racialisation linked to an ideology of whitening that is materialised and perpetuated in urban spaces. The research-creation process was developed in dialogue with the Mapocho river running through the central sectors of Santiago, characterised by colonial architecture, republican monuments and ‘tense’ spaces for national identity and political movements. In this creative process two figures played a key role: a buried arm of the river – which today is the Alameda -, and the Mapuche concept of pewma (dreams) that reconfigures times, spaces, and imaginaries. Both elements question colonial continuity, but also focus on the political force of imagination and the staging of alternative (urban) futures.
Artistic residency ‘El Río’
1 October 2024 – 31 January 2025, Santiago
The ‘El Río’ residency brought together artists from the urban Mapuche diaspora to critique ideologies of whiteness that materialise and perpetuate themselves in the urban landscape. Through a commitment to collective work, the members of the residency aimed to challenge colonial urban materiality and conceive new ways of inhabiting and thinking about the city. The reflection focused on two key elements: the Mapocho River that runs through Santiago and the concept of pewma (dreams). Both embody the colonial past and present, but also their potential for transformation through imagination and the staging of possible transformations.
These two elements have inspired the creation of the site-specific theatre piece Fillke Pewma, accompanied by a modular installation for dream collection.
Site-specific performance FILLKE PEWMA
14-22 June 2025, Santiago (Teatro del Puente)
Fillke Pewma in Mapuche language means dreams. It is a site-specific theatre play that travels alongside the Mapocho, next to the Teatro del Puente, developing a journey against time through the act of walking, audio content and digital technology. Using tools such as maps, interactive audio and augmented reality installations, the materiality of the city and the bodies of the audience expand and connect with the different layers of local history.
Moving between a future submerged in the waters and the past before Santiago was called Santiago, the piece encounters the dreams of the living and also of the dead who inhabited the city, opening up a space for other possible imaginations together with the public.
Fillke
Pewma
