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Based in Valdivia, Chile, Kütral Vargas Huaiquimilla is a writer, visual artist, and performer. She also serves as Communications Manager for different cultural projects in southern Chile.
Her artistic practice is deeply rooted in a contemporary perspective on Mapuche and Latin American indigenous cultures, expanding this exploration through global languages over time.
As a Mapuche and trans artist, her decolonial, feminist, and environmental approach fosters a critical dialogue that engages diverse agents from the territories she explores. Her work merges artistic research with pop culture, mass production, and the complexities of the body, including the history of HIV. This convergence results in an aesthetic and political proposition that challenges local conventions and shapes an expanding Mapuche body.
Her work navigates fields such as fashion, anthropology, and land-based environmental issues, resulting in pieces across diverse formats, including installation, public art, sculpture, video, photography, performance, and literature. She is the author of Performance de la sangre (2024), Factory (2016), and La edad de los árboles (2017).
Currently she is represetend by Judas Gallery. Fellow artist in the 2024-25 program at the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art in New York. Her work has earned significant recognition, including First Honorable Mention in the Public Art category of the 24th and 25th Municipal Youth Art Award and the 2017 Art and Culture Award of the Los Lagos Region. A recipient of Literary and visual arts creation grants from Chile’s Ministry of Cultures and Arts. Her projects have been exhibited internationally in various countries across Latin America, the United States, and Europe.
My practice and artistic work as a Mapuche and transgender person presents and questions diverse themes from a decolonial perspective, showing the complexities of the body and the elements that surround it. I work with the memory of the Mapuche people and their journeys through time to the contemporary, leads me to investigate on anthropological photography, pop culture, fashion, advertising art tattoo, spirituality, land-based environmental issues, HIV history and sexuality from new possibilities.
From literature, I make a contingency of historical and current discourses where gender, sexuality, and politics are questioned, creating hybrids between poetry and narrative with two published books. In my corporeal practices, performance is an important and ritual use for the learning of new knowledge. In photography, video or installation, my projects resignify the global south and rewrite the collective memory of the territories I inhabit. My educational and artistic work aims to create a space where the audience can embody the questions raised, an invitation to dwell on uncertainty.