Hilulis tenkay / Yicas That Are Songs

Virtually, all the colors of the weavings are from the beginning
what we are transforming
and today are the weavings of the mothers
It is where the colors begin and distill their fragrance which is a message.
All the colors shape the same language,
all the languages shape the same force.

Caístulo

Between technique and ceremony, weaving is a continuous act that is held by and within different bodies. In the Wichí language. to weave can only be described as an ongoing action: tayhin (weaving), an intransitive verb that can also be used to refer to building, reconstructing and healing. Demóstenes Toribio points that when this people’s women interlace images, they build, reconstruct and heal memories and imaginations that are part of a long-breathing continuity.
In Santa Victoria Este, a town in Northern Argentina bordering Bolivia and Paraguay, there are more than a hundred indigenous communities that make up the Lhaka Honhat Organization, through which this territory has been defended for decades, achieving its legal recognition as a community ownership of the five peoples that predate the Argentinian State. The Wichí people is one of the former, and within its territory live the women who make up Silät, a collective named after a word in wichí lhämtes that can be translated as “message” or “announcement”.
The community ownership proposes a shared territory. Although it may be organized and divided for use, the entire territory belongs to all its inhabitants, not only humans. For the Wichí people, images are also a community-owned territory, a strand of common imagination. Thus, woven images are at the same time common goods and singular manifestations that are completed and signified with use. Whoever creates a weaving can sell it or exchange it for whatever they may need, but this does not make the images and their messages exclusively theirs. Property can be transitory and authorship can be fluid, considering that they, like other indigenous peoples, understand that a single body can be inhabited by different beings.
Yica is a word in the Quechua language that, according to the first European chroniclers that arrived to what is now known as northern Argentina, previously referred to a cluster of objects that were kept as a guide to reconstruct an autobiographical tale. Curiously, the same word was used to name a natural medicine against the vanishing of memory, and also to name a delicate web that used to be woven by spiders on some crops. Today, the word yica is exclusively used to name a type of bag that is worn day-to-day in the Argentinian Chaco region. A bag used to keep and carry personal objects and food, but not exclusively. It is a vessel for the poetry of personal and collective accounts.
The shapes that make up the yicas’ skin are named after fragments of living beings. The quirquincho’s ears, the carancho’s tracks, the jaguar’s eyes, the suri’s back, the chañar’s seeds, the fish’s tail. Yicas, called hilulis in Wichí, have been made for a long time to gather food and, from the mid-twentieth century, as a currency to obtain the food that the monte no longer provides due to the deforestation caused by agribusiness and other exctactivist economies.
In a conversation I had with weaver and teacher Fidela Flores, from the Alto La Sierra Community, she pointed that the images woven by the women in her town are what managed to survive of Wichí art after the nation state’s annexation and the changes in this culture that were caused by the presence of new religions. Fidela made clear that they do not sell their art; what they sell is an artifact-handicraft in which a network of memories has always found refuge, a way of imagining that they can call art, but does not necessarily correspond with what has been named “art” in the West.
When weaving, a woman does not only uphold and continue a legacy, she also creates and enjoys. The choreographed shapes that are repeated and reinvented are like the water in a stream. N´otenek is a word in wichí that can be translated as “song” or “something that is imitated”, and upon learning it, I thought that weaving can also be a song, an interpretation of a tune whose beginning and ownership may never be known, but that can be learned and repeated to be a part of memory’s vibrating support. Each body transforms it by evoking it, when passing through it.
Demóstenes Toribio tells that in the past the Wichí people’s communities used to sing around the fire to the beat of a drum called fwitsukw at times of joy or sorrow. “We [the Wichí] often listen to the birds singing, to the river and the wind, the bees buzzing and the murmur of the Tayhi. But the weavers, in the taciturn silence of interlacing their yicas, listen to the song of the soul, the friction of the thread when tightening a knot is a song that takes the zigzagging of the eyes to the weaving. This is why the silent yica is a song, a manifestation that lasts in its own existence; its colors, sizes and patterns are imitations of songs, it is like singing as one weaves.“
It is told that the wichí women came from the heavens. They were stars that came down to Earth with the aid of a chaguar thread, a bromelia native to the Gran Chaco. Their thread was cut when they came to eat fish, and since then they took the form we know today. They tell that when they weave with the chaguar’s fibers they can caress the radiance that was taken away from them. They receive messages through the fragrance of this plant that they interlace, creating eyes that may open so that the weaving grows and stretches.
In the body-weaving, in the territory-weaving, in the bag-weaving, the weaving is the message in which the thicknesses of the memory and its wounds, which heal and open again and again, are condensed. Chaguar weavings made by star-women, song-weavings that have traveled through different times as yica-networks. Weaving-screams that have grown and mutated into slogan-flags that transit different stadiums, social economy fairs, design stores and, more recently, galleries and art-centered institutions. In each circumstance and place these weavings are questions and messages. And also, perhaps, songs.

Andrei Fernández

Andrei and Silät thank Gema Darbo for her collaboration in the pre-production of this exhibition. Demóstenes Toribio and Caístulo for their generous teachings that guide us through this path. To Cecilia Cecilia Brunson, Pablo Semán, Clara Johnston, the team at Proyectos Ultravioleta and the families of the weavers-authors: thank you for your support to make this presentation possible.