Paula Baeza Pailamilla is not only a Chilean artist recognized with exhibitions and performances in several countries in South America and Europe—in 2020 she was a guest artist at the 11th Berlin Biennale in Germany. Mapuche activist, has become his body in a museum himself from the conviction that his identity expresses many things that we should know. Since 2016 he belongs to the Mapuche collective Rangiñtulewfu. Flag of the cause of his people, that of the indigenous people of Chile, subjected and marginalized for centuries, Baeza has just been in Madrid to talk about decolonization and star in a performance at the Thyssen Museum. The artist born in 1988 in Santiago de Chile today lives in Zurich. She receives EL PAÍS at the Casa de América. She is cheerful, her smile does not fade from her face except when she talks about the advance of the right in her continent.
Ask. How is the collective imagination decolonized?
Answer. I use the body as a place of encounter, trace and memory, I feel that it is evidence of my colonial history. I am Mapuche and with a hybrid identity due to the context of my family, which moved from the countryside to the city at the beginning of the 20th century. There an identity structure is generated where the Mapuche begins to be thought of from the urban perspective. And from that identity hybridization of what my own body, features and my physical heritage mean, I work on decolonization. When my body appears I feel that there is resistance and an existence that shows that our bodies are still alive. Our ancestral memory is not only in a history of the hegemonic narrative, but we We also have a voice, we are alive and we can represent ourselves. Through the performance I put my body to talk about these conflicts.
Q. Is that story still hegemonic? Has nothing progressed?
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R. In Chile, yes, thanks to the social struggle. But the story of usurpation by the State has been a narrative told by them and has been made invisible.
Q. They?
R. The elite since the mid-1800s, when what they call the pacification of Araucanía began, as they called the occupation of the last territory of Wallmapu, the Mapuche territory. There, this story began to be established that this was Chile, without other identities and other peoples. Other ways of life are beginning to be ignored and a national identity is being built that is Creole, national, mestizo, erasing the others. In school we hardly talk about the invasion of indigenous territories and if we do it is to undermine them, we deserved to be invaded for the sake of development and the future. In the last 50 years it has begun to become visible, the Mapuches began to reconstruct a story that had been stolen. Thanks to that resistance and struggle, spaces have been won. They have no choice but to accept it.
Q. Is the body identity?
R. Yes, but at the same time it is a superplastic, modifiable identity that depends on our context. It is also very transformable, performative. Identity and body are performative.
Q. Is there room for performance In this fast world?
R. People have always had individual and group body expressions. And the performance It is an ancient, ancestral, ritual practice. There will always be space, it will always be necessary to say things that cannot be said otherwise. We Mapuches have the epeu, stories told through animals. The performance It is a cultural tool to preserve collective memory.
Q. one of his performances consisted of placing in the middle of a river to deal with the stones. Another, walking dressed in cardboard in front of luxury stores in Zurich. In the Thyssen, camouflage yourself with the tone of the wall. What is your approach?
R. I position myself as a Mapuche person with the complexity of my history, of my family. I am an indigenous person who is in a museum, in front of luxury stores… My body gives a lot of information, and now in Switzerland is where I feel most observed by people who want to decipher me, because I am also a migrant. When one makes a performance It is calling for a look. But when I stop doing it and they keep looking at me, I feel like my body means a lot. Bodies mean things. Are experts in decoding things for better and worse, and from there I do my basic work.
Q. He has recovered horsehair that were used to make sex toys. What have you discovered?
R. That work opened my mind in relation to pleasure, how Mapuche people desire. In a book by an ethnographer from 1911, Psychology of the Araucanians, there were drawings of objects güesquel, prostheses that men put on to give pleasure to women, made with horsehair and woven by women. There is a super strong knowledge of the female body. It was said that they were used to make people fall in love, there is something emotional and not just sexual. They had the same desires all today.
Q. You define yourself against the European binary gender model. Is the gender binary European?
R. Christianity, super-dominant, imposed different gender roles. Before the roles were different. I am critical of that colonial heritage.
Q. What did Christianization mean?
R. He was in charge of dominating from the spiritual sphere, it was quite conflictive, in the Mapuche culture there is no clear difference between the spiritual, the political and the social, they work at the same time. One of the great damages was that division. The spiritual authorities were demonized, and by eliminating them their organization began to crumble. Christianization came to break the social structure, he told us that there is bad knowledge to fear. A wound for which it has been difficult for us to heal and rediscover our deepest side. Life is not just a political position or a job, there are internal things, from other levels, from a territory, the spiritual, to recover.
Q. What pending issues do we Europeans have regarding decolonization?
R. The task is to think about yourself. What's in the story, how are we living it and addressing it? History cannot be changed, but there are reflections that must continue to occur regarding reparation and self-criticism, something that is done collectively.
Q. Do you feel that Chile has advanced?
R. We had not seen so much violence from the State as in the protests that preceded the 2019 outbreak, it was shocking. At the same time, it was a hope. And the new Constitution that he lost last year was a dream, it considered indigenous peoples, sexual dissidence, women… Now we have reached a hopeless point: continue with Pinochet's Constitution or that of the updated liberal right. Very sad, like Milei's victory. The right is taking power, things are worse. The case of Chile resonates with other countries, at least in Latin America.
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