Medium: Füun

In 2018 I was commissioned by the Chilean visual and mixed-media artist Mále Uribe to translate selected from the collections Sueños de Mujer (Dreams of a Woman) and Danza de la Piedra (Dance of the Stone) by Faumelisa Maquepillán Calfuleo, for an installation entitled, Medium: Füun, combining the spoken and written word with light, sound and architecture.

Exploring the relationships between Mapuche poetry and textile art as female forms of cultural resistance in the Mapuche culture, the project was part of a collaboration with performer (Jane de Florez), sound designer (Yaprak Göker), and two poets; Faumelisa Manquepillán and Graciela Huinao.

Famuelisa’s poems —originally written in both Mapudungún and Spanish— were translated into English for the first time, allowing new dialogues to emerge in a spatial soundscape of multiple languages and poetic voices from Latin America.

Faumelisa Manquepillán Calfuleo is a Mapuche artist based in the south of Chile, working with poetry, music, and sculpture in multiple materials. Her poetry is deeply rooted in the Mapuche cultural traditions, their language and natural ecosystem. The translated poems come from her books ‘Sueños de Mujer’ (‘Dreams of a Woman’) and ‘Danza de la Piedra’ (‘Dance of the Stone’), which were selected with Mále through a long-distance collaboration and multiple conversations about Mapuche women’s voice and the urgent need of building up awareness about their ancient cosmology and rich cultural tradition in Chilean Society. By reading Mapuche poetry we can access their world vision, led by the poetic word in different forms of orality in everyday habits and rituals; carrying ancient knowledge from the spiritual connection to ancestors and nature.

Mále Uribe Forés is a Chilean artist and spatial designer based in London. She is a Royal College of Art graduate working in the encounters of art installation and architecture through the use of material experimentation, geometry and light. Her work focuses on the material surface as a ‘medium’ to alternative narratives and worlds, while also a medium between physical and virtual dimensions.

I hear voices:
Voices born from the womb of my land,
From before and after all time
Voices, of infinite dreams
The ancestral voices
tucked in the traces of the wind.

Voices, that breed the sleeping secrets
of my people,
That herald frontierless truths,
voices of unsullied solitudes laying roots,
roots that spread through my land.

Learn more about the artist and her work here.

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