Claudia Huenchuleo Paquien | Life in Transmotion
Fourth Floor Gallery July 18 - december 15th, 2023

To be in transit is to be an active presence in a world of relational movements and countermovements. To be in transit is to exist relationally and multiply.
-Jodi Byrd, The Transit of Empire

Claudia Huenchuleo Paquien first encountered the Foye tree after relocating from Chile to San Francisco. The tree— first muse and then collaborator—invited Huenchuleo Paquien to  reflect about roots, indigeneity, and colonial expansion.

Native to southern Chile and Argentina, the Foye tree has deep cultural, medicinal, political and spiritual significance for the Mapuche people.

I lived most of my life in Chile and I had never seen a Foye tree until that visit to 
the San Francisco Botanical Gardens, six thousand miles north from our homeland.
Displaced, it looked like it was there alone in a museum.

Do we carry our roots in our DNA, in transgenerational embodied memories? In the series Embodied Resistance, Huenchuleo Paquien holds a branch of the Foye tree, performing a centuries-old gesture that is found in the Illustration of the Parliament of Quillín (1641). She holds the branch in different phases of its life, including one image in which it bears kaskawilla bells, conjuring the social, political and  spiritual functions of music in Mapuche tradition.

Opposite these photographs is Untitled, 2022. An expansive kallfü blue wall—the color of the Mapuche people—bears a replica of the aforementioned illustrated gesture and a magnifying glass, asking the viewer to examine a treaty between Spain and the Mapuche that defined frontiers with the Mapuche nation located, which is today in Huenchuleo Paquien’s hometown.

Do we carry our roots in our DNA, in transgenerational embodied memories?

Kallfü Füdo features two stones, one from Chile and the other from the U.S., held together by a taught blue thread. While traveling virtually through locations and memories during the pandemic, Huenchuleo Paquien began to search for her grandparents house in her homeland on Google Earth. From her dwelling in SF, she tied these two places together, conveying intimate connections between South and North. 

It's an umbilical cord, blue because blue is a highly symbolic color in the Mapuche culture.

Huenchuleo Paquien continues her exploration of the Foye tree through photographs and wool sculptures, activating the tree, working in community with it. In the piece, Imperceptible Rhizomatic Motions, the vines and roots of the tree, created in wool, envelop the blue wall across from a photograph of the artist holding those woolen roots like a suitcase. In these works, she questions theorists Deleuze and Guattari’s use of indigeneity in their concept of nomadic thought because of its construction as preconceptual, deterritorializing, and unstructured. Deterritorialization is an imperial tactic used to dispossess Indigenous people by claiming that their homelands are ‘terra nullius,’ owned by nobody and free for the taking. In Western schools we learn about indigenous nomads, when in fact, this notion implies  forced relocation upon indigenous people..

For In Defiance of Gravity, They Rise, Huenchuleo Paquien uses augmented reality to invite the viewer to see the blue leaf of the Foye tree as it falls and rises, but never lands. Interacting with the space through the viewer’s device, we never get the satisfaction of seeing the leaf hit the ground, as it rises back up over and over again in an act of rebellion.

A transmotional life resists absence and possession 
and finds sovereignty in diplomacy, kinship, and acts of interpretations.