Exhibitions
Weaving the world: Claudia Alarcón & Silät at MASP
Between March 6 and August 2, 2026, the Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand (MASP) hosts Claudia Alarcón & Silät: living, weaving , an exhibition that brings together 25 works and marks the first exhibition in a Brazilian museum of the Argentine artist Claudia Alarcón and the Silät collective, made up of more than one hundred women weavers from the Wichí people.
Originally from La Puntana (Salta, Argentina), Alarcón leads this collective project, which began in 2023 and brings together women from the communities of La Puntana and Alto La Sierra in the north of the province. Her artistic practice is based on the ancestral act of weaving, understood not only as a technique, but also as a cultural language, a memory, and a form of resistance.
The central focus of their production is the use of chaguar, a plant fiber extracted from a bromeliad native to the Gran Chaco—one of the largest biomes in Latin America—renowned for its strength and versatility. The preparation of this fiber and its subsequent hand-weaving, without the use of a loom, directly recalls the traditional making of yicas, bags fundamental to the material and symbolic life of the Wichí people.
The yicas, generally square in shape, incorporate geometric motifs inspired by the natural environment: armadillo ears, owl eyes, or turtle shells. However, Alarcón and Silät's work takes this tradition as its starting point and expands it into new aesthetic territories. Through experimental workshops, the collective has reimagined these objects, developing novel formats and exploring a contemporary dimension of textiles.
One of the most innovative aspects of their practice is collective creation: pieces can be worked on simultaneously by several weavers, diluting individual authorship and reinforcing a communal logic. Multiple patterns, narratives, and sensibilities converge in each work, resulting in compositions that, while seemingly abstract, are deeply imbued with meaning.
Seasons, winds, imagined paths, mythological figures, and memories of the land inhabit her weavings. Elements such as "the night thread," "the star women," or "what the mountain whispers" shape a poetic universe where the visible and the intangible intertwine.
Curated by Adriano Pedrosa and Laura Cosendey, the exhibition not only presents a unique artistic production, but also raises a reflection on the forms of collective creation, the value of ancestral knowledge and its relevance in contemporary art.
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