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Paper short abstract:

Moving from a collaborative research with young indigenous artists and intellectuals, the paper addresses the Mapuche diaspora and its engagement with urban space in Santiago, Chile, challenging traditional constructions of indigenous territoriality and exploring distinct forms of place-making.

Paper long abstract:

Within the frame of a collaborative and practiced-based research with young indigenous artists and intellectuals (the MapsUrbe project, 2017-2020), the paper addresses the Mapuche diaspora and its engagement with urban space in Santiago de Chile. Drawing on artistic interventions in the waria (city), including performance, mapping, and video making, indigenous experiences of territory are explored as encompassing both the city and the land of origin in the rural south, in an on-going negotiation and creative repositioning through and beyond displacement from the ancestral territory.

At the intersection of the city's materialities and the memories, imaginations and trajectories of the project's participants, indigenous spatial experience is understood as dynamic and characterised by movement through places. Focusing on multiple acts of traversing (Guattari 1995) - both within the city and in relation to migration - the proposed paper rethinks the Mapuche concept of tuwün (place of origin), usually linked to rural territories, within the space of the city. Moving from dissenting imaginations (Escobar 2004) and a decolonial perspective based on a process of knowledge co-production collaboratively shared with the research participants, traditional and essentialist constructions of indigenous territoriality are challenged. Through the dialectical and creative relationship between the body and the city, distinct and more complex forms of place-making are explored, allowing for a re-definition of political and poetic horizons of indigenous spatiality.