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Into the Fluid Heart
of Wallmapu Territory
Macarena Gómez-Barris in Conversation
with Sebástian Calfuqueo

Macarena Gómez-­Barris and Sebástian Calfuqueo

In this still from their sumptuous video, Kowkülen (Liquid Being, 2020),
we see Sebástian Calfuqueo’s body suspended from the thick trunk of
a fallen tree. Tied up by deep-­blue ropes to represent the sacred color
of Wallmapu, the ancestral home of Indigenous Mapuche communities,
Calfuqueo’s back forms an ontological bridge, a connection between the
dead wood of the monocultural plantations and the living liquid world of
the river — a n archway between colonialism and the other-­than-­human
Mapuche dreamscape of the perimónton. Calfuqueo’s body hangs like a
suspension bridge between the colonial violence of IRL and the Western
civilizational paradigm of their mediated virtuality. The Mapuche nonbi-
nary body lives as the transitive time space – bound coordinates between
this world and the next.
What are these arts of land and water defense? And how does trans-­
Indigenous embodiment mediate, refuse, and complicate the Western sep-
arateness of artistic and political realms? The earth’s depletion depends on
the somatic labor of the racialized female and trans-­femme body. This global
system of interlinked brutality converts life from Indigenous resource-­r ich
geographies into multinational capital, as it did along the Maule River for
the Spanish-­Canadian corporation Endesa. Extractive capitalism operates
through the trans-­eco-­geno-­feminicidal capitalist impulse. In Wallmapu
territories, like throughout the Américas, the process of anthropocenic
extraction has only accelerated with the search for the last oil, the last for-
ests, and the last water.

Social Text 149 • Vol. 39, No. 4 • December 2021

Social Text
DOI 10.1215/01642472-9408098  149Duke
© 2021 • December
University 2021
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Figure 1. Still from Kowkülen (Liquid Being, 2020).

Calfuqueo’s body is not a metaphor, or a flattened aestheticization,

but the literal materiality of this settler extractive violence. The body work
here diffuses the gaze, hanging suspended, existing in the plane of the
otherwise. Calfuqueo turns toward a future that is not their mere oblitera-
tion. The social poesis of this transitive archway uses the liquid capacities
of water to break the barriers of ossified colonial modes of seeing.
Calfuqueo turns away from the extractive gaze of the camera, fold-
ing instead into the mirror of a liquid embrace. In the bridge of untrans-
latability, between English, Spanish, and Mapundungun, what is palpa-
ble is that Mapuche gender/sex transitivity is palpable. Weye, alka domo,
antu, kuram, kangechi: these are the terms within Mapundungun that sig-
nify and multiply the category of nonbinary. They signify a pluriverse of
gender and sex identities and forms of existing, both found within and
erased by the colonial archive, as Calfuqeuo’s research attests. In Cal-
fuqueo’s land-­and water-­based performances, they fuse the body and
land together, making visible how embodied Mapuche nonconforming
practices lie at the heart of Wallmapu’s ontological difference.
The performative arch or portal in this body work represents what
Kanaka Maoli scholar J. Kēhaulani Kauanui has called enduring Indige-
neity, to name the capacity of Indigenous peoples to resist, persist, and
refuse the death drive of settler colonialism, as well as the operative logic of
settler colonialism in its militarized march to eliminate the Native. Here,

76 Gómez- ­B arris and Calfuqueo • Into the Fluid Heart of Wallmapu Territory
Calfuqueo’s Indigenous nonbinary body breathes and generates capacities
that live in the squeeze of the plantation economy, under colonial occu-
pation, in the breach of water scarcity and land occupation, enduring the
multifold onslaught of other forms of late capitalist accumulation.
Since Pedro de Valdivia’s conquest expeditions in the sixteenth cen-
tury, and the ongoing military campaigns during republican nation build-

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ing, the people of the Earth — M apuche — have indeed endured Indigene-
ity. In Calfuqueo’s image, then, we see a contrast that pushes against the
quest for biodiverse diminishment. With Calfuqueo we move into the
vivid richness of trans weye, alka domo, antu kuram, kangechi life (terms
for a plurality of sexualities). Liquid being, fluidity itself is the antidote.
In its fluidity, trans-­Indigenous embodiment, in this case Mapuche
gender-­sex transness, does not separate community identity from anticolo-
nial struggle. These histories are intertwined, entangled, and bound in the
colonial sex game of utter domination. They are bound together in the politi-
cal terrain of the call for demilitarization, decolonization, decapitalization.
And they are wound up in trans-­Mapuche life like the Andes mountains
themselves that stretch as a communal and set of resistant histories beyond
the boundaries of the nation-­state. Indeed, Mapuche ancestral territories
cross over and between the boundaries of Chile and Argentina. Mapuche
scholar Luis Cárcamo-­Huechante poignantly writes of the sound waves,
through radio, that bridge Wallmapu territories on both sides of the Andes.
The following is part of our ongoing enlivening dialogue that con-
tinues to take place in the techno-­lag time of the pandemic. It represents
one piece of our ongoing collaboration.

Macarena Gómez-­Barris: Thinking Indigenous embodiment through your perfor-

mances as well as through Wallmapu territory is critical to how we can imagine
otherwise, or to lean into the grounded relationalities that Cherokee scholar Jodi
Byrd describes. It allows us to leave behind the overburdened history of colonial
representation of the nonbinary Indigenous body. This may be what Jack Halber-
stam describes in the work of Two-­Spirit Cree artist Ken Monkman, as wildness,
or the move away from the civilizing paradigm.1
Decolonial artistic praxis like your own, Sebastián, offers an opening, a
method for undoing Western visual history, as well as building that space of the
otherwise — the worlds that exist before, during, and beyond the colonial anthro-
pocene. How do you deal with the legacies of coloniality and force of gender/sex
normativity in your life experience and work?

Sebástian Calfuqueo: For me, gender is a colonial construction that has mar-
ginalized, reinscribing colonial binaries. We have been bullied, insulted,
violated in the most violent ways because of cis hegemony in the heterosex-
ual paradigm. My work is a proposal for other ways of seeing the present,

Social Text 149 • December 2021 77

 the future, and to read the history of colonial narratives by critically seeing
the profound implications of coloniality and its deterritorialization.
My life experience relates to the historical violence that I sustained as
a nonbinary Mapuche individual. Chilean and Latin American societies are
profoundly racist in how they relate to Indigenous communities; we have
been constantly subjected to live according to the parameters assigned by

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colonialism. Forced displacements and diasporas have resulted in Mapuche
communities migrating from their ancestral homes and their rural com-
munities to urban cities. This is not just my family’s story but also that of
thousands upon thousands of others from those territories. Because of this,
my work connects with other experiences of racism and racialization that
are informed foremost by the extreme violence of colonial history.
The states of Argentina and Chile are colonial extensions, through
the nation project and through the violence of the military campaigns such
as the occupation of the Araucanía and Desert Campaign that took place
during the nineteenth century and stripped Wallmapu, Mapuche historical
territory from us. We are not Argentines, nor Chileans. We are Mapuche.

This settler colonial violence is directed against the earth, natura, and the
Mapuche tongue, body, forms of living and being. In your body of work on water
and territory you integrate the concept of ko (water) with mongen (vida). This is
what the critic Cristián Vargas Paillahuque has described as a critical recupera-
tion, since in your work you directly address the devastation of neoliberal expul-
sions and privatizations.

The Mapuche body is part of our territory, part of natura, and also part
of the historical present. The historical narrative about Mapuche peoples
refers to a heroic uprising as residing in our collective past. The govern-
ment of the present does not want us to speak of our political demands, of
land restitution, or of reparations for the genocidal violence we experience.
We make our demands as political subjects with a voice, yet in European
and republican Chilean art we have been represented through their colonial
lens. Our collective political voice vindicates our territories, our bodies, our
experiences. We write our own history, such as the work that the Comuni-
dad Mapuche Oral History Collective does to tell our own history.
My work is directly linked to the archive and the revision of colo-
nial history, whether it be to revise chronicles or colonial tales. It’s been
important for me to search through these archives, which are always cre-
ated through a colonial lens concerned with Indigenous bodies. I research
how the history of bodies and sexual identities in precolonial societies was
built, and it is a far more biodiverse world. In the Indigenous archive of
gender and sex, we find traces of other ways of thinking far beyond the
prevailing binary introduced by the Western world.

78 Gómez- ­B arris and Calfuqueo • Into the Fluid Heart of Wallmapu Territory
 My work questions the neoliberal model of privatization put in place
by Augusto Pinochet during the dictatorship. The basic right to water is
not guaranteed in Chile, and many of our communities no longer have
access to clean water on a daily basis. This is the most basic right, and it
has been stripped from us by those who profit from our territories.
I believe we must question extractivist projects like mining, hydro-

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electricity, and forest monoculture that are owned and organized by the
large European transnational corporations. They continue to seek our
territories for their imperial appropriation and ongoing quest to accumu-
late wealth.

Though we were in contact, I met you in person for the first and only time just
months before the pandemic at Performance Space New York, an alternative
space in the East Village. Your work was part of Knowledge of Wounds, a two-­
day series of performances, readings, and discussions led by Indigenous com-
rades, S. J. Norman and the scholar Joseph M. Pierce. You performed “Bodies
in Resistance,” and I was so taken with the use of hair in your work. And now
on Zoom, I see that your hair has grown so long.

The pandemic, querida. We grow our hair out. But yes, hair plays a very
important role in my life story and in the process of feminizing my body
as a teenager. School was the place that mutilated the possibility of my
ability to inhabit my own body. Patriarchal norms made me cut my hair
repeatedly because men simply are not supposed to wear their hair long.
There is also a history of Indigenous bodies and colonial hair cut-
ting, as you know. To assimilate Mapuche peoples assigned male at birth
to a Western vision of masculinity, they stripped us of our long hair. It
has been associated with femininity. For me, hair, my hair, is absolutely
linked to the colonial structure that continues to rule many of our com-
munities and territories.
My interest in hair is also related to gender and visuality. Indigenous
men should cut their hair to adapt to the occidental culture as an impera-
tive. Hair, for many Indigenous peoples, has a relation and correlation to
strength and vitality. Cutting hair, like making Indigenous languages ille-
gal and binarizing sexual and gender plurality, was key to the Christian-
izing and civilizing project of the Spanish and then the Chilean nation-­
state. Such are the logics of cultural invasion.
In that performance, I write with hair as an act of reinscribing in the
narrative the history of nonbinary Mapuche peoples. And also as a way of
bringing dignity to the history of those who were disappeared through the
translations made in the colonial archive, that of Catholic priests whose
patriarchal view has marginalized our nonbinary, third-­gender voices and
experiences.

Social Text 149 • December 2021 79

 Speaking of translation and the colonial archive, Mapudungun, like other
Indigenous languages, has made a resurgence, in this case thanks to the impor-
tant work that the Colectivo, Mapuche poets, and many artists have done. Can
you speak about the monolingual tongue against your Native tongue? How does
the language of Mapudungun figure in your practice?

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Yes, the monolingual tongue. Stereotypes and social prejudices limit us.
They box us into delimited spaces that only serve ruling colonial and patri-
archal interests. My tongue is multilingual. Learning Mapudungun — t he
Mapuche language — has been a slow process that I began as an adult. My
grandparents were punished, struck with a wooden rod on their hands
for speaking their language. Today there is an important revitalization of
Mapudungun taking shape, which is why I think it’s a political choice to
utilize it in my work and bring it forward in my artistic, visual, and per-
formative practices.
Language is a political space, and within our language we can under-
stand the entire cosmovision of Indigenous communities. For me, lan-
guage is a powerful tool to be able to see into the world of the other from
a different sensibility. To recuperate is a reparative gesture, and to include
Mapudungun in my work is my duty as a Mapuche subject.

What is the significance and context of your three-­minute video, sound, and tex-
tual work Kowkülen ( Liquid Being, 2020)? It is such a rich work that builds
layers of saturated color as well as includes element and sound.

Kowkülen translates, as you say, into “liquid being.” This work, narrated
with text over water, presents a physical, personal, and poetic journey
regarding water, wetlands, lakes, oceans, rivers, and slopes. This work was
created in Curacautín, in the Araucanía region, an area that is in constant
siege at the hands of the Chilean militarized police. It is also a region that
has been tapped by national timber companies who have developed neo-
colonial extractivist projects on behalf of European enterprises. Together
they enable the monoculture of Insigne Pine — a nonnative tree species that
requires large quantities of water — and in the process deprive thousands of
people access to water.
This work questions the relationship between life and water and the
consequences of extractivism with relation to itrofil mongen (Mapuche for
“all forms of life”) necessary for harmony on our land. This work also seeks
to complicate the Western colonial legacy that introduced a binary code
defined by opposition: feminine/masculine, civilization/barbarism, black/
white. We as a species are not binary, and we move through waters that
adapt to diverse containers of our experiences and bodies.

80 Gómez- ­B arris and Calfuqueo • Into the Fluid Heart of Wallmapu Territory
I love the idea of fluidity and beingness, the overflowing of the binary container
of gender and sex. To me this is part of the flexible work of decolonial cuirness
and transness, the ability to be fluid, adaptive, and move into other forms of
coexistence. Thank you for that.

Por supuesto, querida.

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Finally, the use of Mapuche blue has a profound significance in your work such
as in the ropes in Kowkülen. How do you use it to signal a complex cosmology
and forms of liquid being that reach beyond singularity?

The guñelve (a star that represents the planet Venus, or the morning star)
has been a Mapuche symbol that I have used in several works. It’s an image
that can be seen in colonial paintings and narratives as a symbol of Mapu-
che resistance. For me it has been important to reclaim the value of this
symbol and what it means for the Mapuche community.
The color blue is another element associated with my heritage. My
last name translates to “blue flint” — t his color is sacred in the Mapuche
worldview and is very valuable. I use it in a political way to inhabit this
imaginary aesthetic that is present in the Mapuche psyche.
Mapuche stories are full of aquatic beings that transport souls, give
birth to the world, or live underneath its liquid coat. The characters of
Trengtreng and Kaykay, Shumpall, Trempulkalwe, Ngen-­ko, among others,
emerge from and inhabit the water, in which they take on various forms. The
universe was created in water, and at the same time, water is a guide toward
the dimension of death. We can trace these testimonials, memories, and cre-
ations in oral/written narratives, in poetry, in their ülkantun (songs), and even
in surnames and toponomies throughout the territory today called Chile.
For me these waters are about fluidity and thinking forms other
than the mere binary of masculine and feminine. In the power of water, I
also see life, territory, and the connection. The diverse species of the for-
est want collaboration to arrive in the waters, in the fluid forms of being
where the waters are a point of connection and sensibility, as well as a
form of resistance.

Sebastián Calfuqueo received an MFA in fine arts from the University of Chile, and
they are part of the Mapuche collective Rangiñtulewfü and Yene Revista. Their work
appeals to their Mapuche inheritance to propose a critical reflection on the social,
cultural, and political status of the Mapuche subject in Latin America. Recent exhibi-
tions include solo presentations at Galería 80m2 Livia Benavides, Galería D21, and
Galería Metropolitana.

Macarena Gómez-­Barris is author of Where Memory Dwells: Culture and State Violence
in Chile (2010), The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives (2017),
and Beyond the Pink Tide: Artistic and Political Undercurrents in the Americas (2018).

Social Text 149 • December 2021 81

 Her new book project is At the Sea’s Edge: On Coloniality and the Oceanic. Her essays
have appeared in Antipode, GLQ, and the Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, as
well as in numerous other venues and art catalogs. She is founding director of the
Global South Center, a transdisciplinary space for experimental research, artistic,
and activist praxis at Pratt Institute.

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Note
1. See Byrd, Transit of Empire; Halberstam, Wild Things.

References
Byrd, Jodi. Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism. Minneapolis: Uni-
versity of Minnesota Press, 2011.
Halberstam, Jack. Wild Things: The Disorder of Desire. Durham, NC: Duke Univer-
sity Press, 2020.

82 Gómez- ­B arris and Calfuqueo • Into the Fluid Heart of Wallmapu Territory