Mapu Kufüll (Land Seafood) is a 3D animation created by Sebastián Calfuqueo, a wariache^[1] artist who works around Mapuche communities and territories. Their work seeks to empower the relationship between human and nature, through starting with the Mapuche concept “Mapuche kimün”. This passing of ancestral knowledge down generations nurtures an embodied relationship of respect and “good living” with the environment and all other living species.

Mapu Kufüll, offers an insight into this way of being, through adopting a video game aesthetic to tell the story a young child collecting mushrooms. With the Mapuche kimün (knowledge) from their grandmother to guide them, and a large basket for what they find, the character is careful to collect only what they need, and to return home thankful, without leaving a trace.

Set in the Mapuche territory Wallmapu, which was incorporated into Chilean national territory through a series of military campaigns between 1861-1883, the narrative shares the importance of mushrooms for the Mapuche communities during this period of conflict and up to the present day.

With the title taking its name from the Mapudungun name for mushrooms, Mapu Kufüll shows how specific fungi have been a crucial food source, as well as a symbol of resistance, for Mapuche communities. Read more about sustainable mushroom harvesting in the guide below.

[1] Wariache: From the Mapudungun “Waria” (City) and “Che” (People), the people from the city, regarding the Mapuche people who were born outside the traditional Mapuche territory.

 

Follow the link for Sebastián’s

Sustainable Mushroom Harvesting Guide

 

Screenshots from identification workshop

 

Through sharing indigenous ways of thinking Sebastián is presenting an alternative relationship to nature that counters the western, extractivist perspective. By proposing a way of coexisting that is generous and collective, they hope to create a culture of understanding and exchange, where others can bring their places, stories, minds and gazes to the discussion to, ultimately, improve our bond with nature.

For Digital Notes, Mapu Kufüll, was shown alongside two other video works in a Shorts Screening on Thursday 8 April.

To get a sense of the live programme check out our highlights on Instagram.

 

 

 

 

Sebastián is an artist and Visual Arts MFA graduate from the University of Chile. They create installations, ceramics, performances and video art that explore the cultural similarities and differences, between indigenous and western ways of thinking.

Through a practice that critically engages with ideas surrounding race, sex, gender and social class, Sebastián creates works that seeks to revise the political, social and cultural implications of these ideas from a decolonial perspective.

From Mapuche origin, their work takes their cultural inheritance as a starting point in order to initiate critical reflections on the Mapuche subject’s status within contemporary Chilean society and Latin America.

Recent exhibitions include solo presentations at Galería 80m2 Livia Benavides, Galería D21, Galería Metropolitana, Parque Cultural de Valparaíso and Museo de Arte Contemporáneo from Universidad de Chile, Quinta Normal building in Santiago de Chile.

They are part of the feminist Mapuche collective Rangiñtulewfü, Yene Magazine, 
and they are represented by Patricia Ready Gallery.