Whitney Biennial 2024: Even Better Than the Real Thing

Floor 6

Born 1991 in Santiago, Chile
Lives in Ngulumapu, Wallmapu (Chile)

TRAY TRAY KO invites viewers to embark on a journey into the heart of Mapuche cosmology through a video performance in which the artist interweaves her own body into a sacred landscape. The Mapuche people have lived in the south-central regions of Chile and Argentina for thousands of years, and they hold that the flow of water—especially waterfalls—brings with it medicinal and healing properties. Draped in an electric blue fabric, the artist acts as a conduit between the tangible and the spiritual, blurring the boundaries between human form and natural elements. This meditation on fluidity, literal and symbolic, also works against other perceived binaries, including that of gender. By highlighting the interconnectedness of her own personhood and the landscape, Seba Calfuqueo resists dominant forces that threaten the area, including the Chilean government’s efforts to destroy Indigenous homelands for commercial use, and situates her own identity as a trans person within the natural world.