Cecilia Brunson Projects presents Choreography of the Imagination, an exhibition of hand-spun textiles by leading Indigenous collective Claudia Alarcón & Silät, following their acclaimed inclusion in the 60th Venice Biennale, curated by Adriano Pedrosa.
Founded in 2023 in Salta, Argentina, Silät is a collective of more than a hundred Wichí women weavers from the Alto la Sierra and La Puntana communities. Working with fibres from the native chaguar plant - a material with deep roots in Wichí culture - they create collaborative, fluid compositions that echo ancestral geometries and stories, and tie the weavers into dynamic imaginaries, connecting them to past generations.
This exhibition marks Claudia Alarcón & Silät’s second presentation at the gallery and unveils a new body of work, in which Alarcón considers the lineage and evolution of Wichí textile traditions, the ‘yica’ fabrics of the Wichí people having provided one source of inspiration to artists such as Josef and Anni Albers and Sheila Hicks as they travelled through South America in the 20th century.
Alarcón, herself from the La Puntana Wichí community, leads Silät in collaboration with local curator Andrei Fernández. Together, they work to revitalise and reinterpret Wichí weaving practices - particularly ceremonial techniques such as the ‘antique stitch’, central to this exhibition - while fostering intergenerational dialogue, creative agency, and economic self-sufficiency among women facing the twin threats of cultural erasure and climate crisis.
The collective’s work contributes to the rich lineage of geometric abstraction in South America and opens a nuanced dialogue with the legacy of Anni and Josef Albers, whose engagement with pre-Hispanic textiles informed their modernist experiments. Anni Albers held chaguar pieces in her personal collection and featured them in her seminal 1965 text On Weaving.
Alarcón & Silät reflect on this exchange, not as a linear influence but as an evolving conversation - embracing the returns and reverberations of Indigenous visual language as a dynamic foundation for contemporary expression.
The exhibition coincides with the collective’s first institutional solo show, titled Tayhin, at the De La Warr Pavilion in the UK (14 June – 14 September 2025).
Claudia Alarcón and Silät: Choreography of the Imagination press release
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