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Building on analyses of the relationship between race, aesthetics and politics, the volume elaborates on the epistemological possibilities arising from collaborative and decolonial methodologies at the intersection of ethnography, art, performance and the urban space. It moves from practice-based and collaborative research with young Mapuche and mestizo artists and activists in Santiago (Chile), drawing together a range of different materials: from artworks to theatre and performance; from graphics to audio and visual materials. An edited collection, the book is constructed by shifting between different authorships and changing perspectives from the individual to the collective. This approach, while to a certain extent within the classical structure of editors/authors, plays with the roles of researcher/research participant, highlighting the ambiguities, frictions and exchanges involved in this relationship. Elaborating on indigenous knowledge production, the book thus addresses the possibility of disrupting the social and material landscape of the (post)colonial city by articulating meanings through artistic and performative representations. As such, the essays contained in the book put forward alternative imaginations constructed through an aesthetic defined by the Mapuche concept of champurria (‘mixed’): a particular way of knowing and engaging with reality, and ultimately an active process of home- and self-making beyond the spatialities usually assigned to colonised bodies and subjects. Actively engaging with current debates through collective writing by indigenous people raising questions in terms of decolonisation, the book stands as both an academic and a political project, interrogating the relationship between activism and academia, and issues of representation, authorship and knowledge production.
’, simply put, to certain political and/or identity processes located on the fringes of the mainstream. What is the work of a Mapuche musician or artist supposed to convey? What are the languages, formats and codes allowed to express one’s own identity? Who is the controlling, abstract entity that determines what is allowed and what is not? What should the musical or artistic work of a champurria – as the descendants of Chilean
political aesthetic defined by the Mapuche concept of champurria (‘mixed up’); this concept, which originally referred to racial mixture in a pejorative way, has recently been appropriated by Mapuche living in urban contexts and constantly negotiating between different identities and senses of belonging, and, often coming from mixed families, claiming their own mestizaje or miscegenation as something creative, heterogeneous, yet still entirely indigenous, as will be discussed further in this introduction. What we refer
demonstrations there in the Plaza de Armas, afterwards we go back to all our ‘territories’ within the city: Puente Alto, Peñalolén, Recoleta. I think it is necessary … I am not in favour of a champurriada identity – being a champurria myself – because a champurriada identity is an identity without substance; it is weak. What we must do is to ‘ champurrear ’ the Mapuche, to shake him up. When they call me champuerrado – I know that I am champurria , my same last name
maybe two or three times when we had to go and we couldn’t. Then, when we wanted to do a re-founding of the city on the hill, it was the group itself who said, ‘We’re not interested in doing any re-founding at all.’ Of course, that possibility alone has certain patriarchal and colonial meanings. In the end, it was such an important place for the closing of the play but until then it had escaped us … ‘W HAT WE DID IS CHAMPURRIA’ Claudio : At one point the question was of
reflection about the complex ways in which their bodies inhabit the territory of the champurria . Nevertheless, even though I feel mestiza myself, I did not want to appropriate their situated gaze and cultural belonging. So I decided to go back to these conversations with lamgen who grew up in Santiago and live there to this day, addressing them with a more ‘formal’ request to contribute to the development of an imaginary of urban Mapuche jewellery. Their words and reflections, recorded as part of
which Mapuzugun is employed in everyday life in the city as a champurria language. Through neologisms and mixtures with Spanish, malapropisms that become part of common use or Mapuzugun nouns becoming Spanish verbs: ‘ rukear ’, for example, meaning to ‘make home’. 10 Such are the practices of dwelling that both reproduce and reinvent indigenous identities and belongings, inhabiting an imbalanced balance that appears in several forms, multiplying as the mimicking photographs did
the end of the nineteenth century. The reworking of this iconography entailed putting one of the figures most commonly used to depict indigeneity in Chile in the context of the city, dressing him with a black leather jacket and colouring the picture. The same image was later used for the exhibition poster. Yet when it came to the play, the poster’s figure turned into the Comandante Boliviano: she took Lloncon’s place like she takes the baton passed to her by David in the final scene. A champurria