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SEBA CALFUQUEO: CAUTÍN
October 6, 2026 to January 17, 2027
Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza
P.º del Prado, 8, Centro, 28014 Madrid, Spain
Click here for more information about the exhibition
Few rivers shape a territory the way the Cautín shapes the Araucanía: a region belonging to the Wallmapu and the ancestral land of the Mapuche people, a place marked by successive colonial projects that have sought to reduce it to an extractive resource, from the early evangelizing missions to the contemporary process of water privatization. Thus, the Cautín River is not—in the first solo exhibition in Europe by Mapuche artist Seba Calfuqueo (Santiago, Chile, 1991)—a simple watercourse, but a living, complex territory composed of rocks and sand, animals and plants, protective spirits and human beings.
The show is the result of years of research into this river, in which Calfuqueo acts as a translator of the forces that inhabit it, giving them form through different languages: zoomorphic ceramics representing endemic species decorated with synthetic materials, video animations revisiting foundational narratives of the Mapuche people, and embroidered paintings that rewrite the region drawing on historical archives and local flora. Woven through all of this is the artist's own body, present in the exhibition through a video performance.
Cautín is an exhibition by TBA21 Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary and the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, produced in collaboration with the Centro Cultural La Moneda (Santiago de Chile). All works in the exhibition are new commissions by TBA21.
The exhibition is set to travel internationally to two additional venues: from May to September 2027 it will be shown in Chile, at the Centro Cultural La Moneda, and in 2028 it will travel to the United States, to New York, where it will be on view from January to March at the Wallach Art Gallery, at Columbia University's Lenfest Center for the Arts.