This article explores the relationship between land, words and silence, and the ways they are articulated in biographical trajectories. In the context of displacement and successive home-making, it follows the spatial and temporal trajectories of a Mapuche family, their non-linear routes through the experience of exile, and the process of dwelling in the elsewhere. Exile is addressed here as a condition of being, a tension between presence and absence that involves loss, and that is negotiated through the interplay between words and silence, leading to the meaningful emergence of what I call 'unexpected places'. At the core of this argument is a recognition of the intersubjective and hermeneutic borders that exist between persons in relation to speech and silence, in this case my partial understanding of the word 'land' (mapu), which disclosed the limits of language and the specificity of one's lifeworld, and thus the boundaries of anthropological knowledge.
In Latin American cities, indigenous peoples' presence is often overlooked: symbols and iconographies either exclude them as a minority or 'memorialise' them as part of a distant past. Through ethnographic observation, walking and visual narrative analysis, and adapting Charles Hale's constructions of indigeneity, this article examines the different representations of indigeneity in urban public space in Santiago de Chile. It interrogates its forms and multiple meanings and the ways in which these are challenged and appropriated by current indigenous artistic production and activism, highlighting the struggle to emphasise contemporary, hybrid lived experiences rather than essentialised, neo-colonial memorialisation. The article addresses urban imaginaries of indigeneity as an arena for the struggle between different representations, which are highly relevant to the new Chilean Constitution and demands for pluri-nationalism, and form part of an ongoing (de)construction of entrenched power relations.
This article reflects on collaborative research carried out during the COVID-19 pandemic involving indigenous youth co-investigators from different urban settings in Bolivia and a UK- and Bolivia-based research coordination team. Unlike previous studies that highlight the potential of generating a shared co-presence via virtual engagements and digital methods when face-to-face interactions seem less desirable, this article offers a more cautious account. We question the existence of a shared co-presence and, instead, posit co-presence as fragmented and not necessarily mutual, requiring careful engagement with power imbalances, distinct socio-economic and space-time positionings, and diverse priorities around knowledge generation among team members. These considerations led us to iteratively configure a hybrid research approach that combines synchronous and asynchronous virtual and face-to-face interactions with multi-modal methods. We demonstrate how this approach enabled us to generate a sense of co-presence in a context where collaborator access to a shared space-time was limited, differentiated, or displaced.
The exhibition MapsUrbe: The invisible City (December 2018 – January 2019) staged the creations of young Mapuche artists and activists addressing the politics and history of the indigenous diaspora in Santiago (Chile). Engaging with urban space materiality and the trajectories shaped by displacement and endurance within the city, the exhibition explored subversive aesthetics and political imaginations, crafting alternative spatialities and temporalities. Building on two years of collaborative work with Mapuche artists and activists, and moving from an initial act of generative refusal, this paper explores a redefinition of curatorial practices within collective artistic projects that aim at opposing dominant historical narratives. By reflecting on an experience of collective co-curation, it shows how these practices challenge established and institutionalized narratives embedded in public spaces, resulting in creative appropriations and powerful counter-narratives ‘on our own terms.’
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