Set in stone? 'Desired whiteness' and the urban space: A collaborative research in (post) colonial Chile.
Lead Research Organisation:
University of Sheffield
Department Name: Urban Studies and Planning
Abstract
Issues of race have long been silenced in many (post)colonial contexts in Latin America and beyond, and are not established in public discourse, especially in relation to the implicit social norm of 'whiteness'. Nevertheless, as sadly highlighted by the Covid-19 health emergency and by the BLM protests after the murder of George Floyd, inequalities are closely linked to racialisation processes, shaping social life in many cities across the world. Chile constitutes an excellent location for thinking about these issues, due to the recent strong reaction against high levels of socio-economic inequality and its racial dimensions. In October 2019, the country was shaken by political unrest, questioning the traditional emphasis on class for the understanding of inequality and privilege in one of the most unequal countries in the world. The income gap between rich and poor is 65% wider than the OECD average and privatisation has had lasting consequences for social security, education, and basic services, exacerbating the racialised dimensions of class inequality that locate indigenous people and mestizos disproportionately in the lower strata.
Working in close collaboration with organisations in Santiago, the project aims to make visible the otherwise hidden processes of racialisation through practice-based collaborative interventions employing digital media. Moving from a historical research and ethnographic fieldwork phase in Santiago, a mobile phone app 'MonuRama' will be collaboratively designed. The app will implement a digital interactive city-tour in particular areas of the capital city, through which ideas of 'whiteness' will be addressed as embedded in urban materialities - colonial and postcolonial monuments, statues, landmarks and architectures - shaping the city's socio-spatial landscape, and being embodied/challenged in interracial frictions. Santiago's urban landscape will be addressed as a context where the 'desired whiteness' of the Chilean nation is materialised, and a digitally mediated space for interaction will be created moving from architecture, monuments, and landmarks. In the exchange between the material representation of the national ideology of racial homogeneity, indigenous and mestizo counternarratives, and the app users' responses and reactions, the ways in which ideas of 'whiteness' are enacted, embodied, and challenged will be analysed.
The mobile phone app 'MonuRama' will be open access and will be designed by a dedicated external designer, with whom the team will be in contact from the beginning of the fieldwork. The app will then be launched through trial events and public debates, and will be monitored in its use in close collaboration with the local team. This aims at fostering public debate over racialisation processes and contributing to shaping anti-racism policies and city governance agendas by inviting policymakers to dissemination events through the project's partners networks.
'Set in stone?' will provide an original contribution to studies of racial inequalities and generate important knowledge exchange between academic and non-academic sectors, involving the social sciences and digital media production. Its key impact will be the elaboration of an interdisciplinary and collaborative methodology that can be applied in different contexts to tackle urban segregation and global racial inequalities; its main outputs include a collaboratively developed app and related trial sessions in Santiago; a project website; academic publications and conference participation; four knowledge exchange activities in European and Latin American cities.
Working in close collaboration with organisations in Santiago, the project aims to make visible the otherwise hidden processes of racialisation through practice-based collaborative interventions employing digital media. Moving from a historical research and ethnographic fieldwork phase in Santiago, a mobile phone app 'MonuRama' will be collaboratively designed. The app will implement a digital interactive city-tour in particular areas of the capital city, through which ideas of 'whiteness' will be addressed as embedded in urban materialities - colonial and postcolonial monuments, statues, landmarks and architectures - shaping the city's socio-spatial landscape, and being embodied/challenged in interracial frictions. Santiago's urban landscape will be addressed as a context where the 'desired whiteness' of the Chilean nation is materialised, and a digitally mediated space for interaction will be created moving from architecture, monuments, and landmarks. In the exchange between the material representation of the national ideology of racial homogeneity, indigenous and mestizo counternarratives, and the app users' responses and reactions, the ways in which ideas of 'whiteness' are enacted, embodied, and challenged will be analysed.
The mobile phone app 'MonuRama' will be open access and will be designed by a dedicated external designer, with whom the team will be in contact from the beginning of the fieldwork. The app will then be launched through trial events and public debates, and will be monitored in its use in close collaboration with the local team. This aims at fostering public debate over racialisation processes and contributing to shaping anti-racism policies and city governance agendas by inviting policymakers to dissemination events through the project's partners networks.
'Set in stone?' will provide an original contribution to studies of racial inequalities and generate important knowledge exchange between academic and non-academic sectors, involving the social sciences and digital media production. Its key impact will be the elaboration of an interdisciplinary and collaborative methodology that can be applied in different contexts to tackle urban segregation and global racial inequalities; its main outputs include a collaboratively developed app and related trial sessions in Santiago; a project website; academic publications and conference participation; four knowledge exchange activities in European and Latin American cities.
| Title | FILLKE PEWMA |
| Description | The artistic installation is conceived as an assemblage of artistic objects that rehearse alternative practices of urban inhabitation that activate materialities, technologies, and languages capable of challenging regimes of whiteness. Its materiality operates as an ephemeral and textile architecture, whose formal logic radically distances itself from the grammars of monumentality, rigidity, and permanence historically associated with devices of urban power representation. Instead, it deploys a constructive model based on lightness, weaving and assembly, where organic materials, experimental biomaterials and digital technologies converge. From a formal point of view, the work is structured around a habitable membrane constructed from witral fabrics - a Mapuche textile technique - pieces of basketry in biomaterials and photographic cyanotype surfaces. An augmented reality environment is incorporated, expanding the physical dimension of the object into an intangible visual landscape: a forest of pewen (araucarias) emerges above the surrounding urban space. In its functional dimension, the installation constitutes a collective dream archive. People enter, scan a QR code, share a dream - a pewma - and in turn receive the dream of another visitor. This device establishes a circuit of exchange that replaces the logic of accumulation typical of the colonial archive with an economy of affective circulation and narrative o-production. |
| Type Of Art | Artistic/Creative Exhibition |
| Year Produced | 2025 |
| Impact | This is still in process as the research is still ongoing. |
| URL | http://www.fillkepewma.com |
| Title | FILLKE PEWMA |
| Description | The site-specific performance FILLKE PEWMA - 'multiple and diverse dreams' in the Mapuche language - claims the city as a scenario for Indigenous storytelling. The performance starts in a theatre but travels in the surrounding urban space, following Indigenous trajectories of migration and re-existence. The performance plays with two key aspects of the Mapuche experience of displacement in the city of Santiago (Chile): the relationship with its urban river; the Mapuche concept of dreaming as a vector for stories, visions and imaginations juxtaposed to the stone-like fixity of the white city. The performance is set in 2092. It has rained for forty days and forty nights, the city is flooded, mostly underwater. In the first scene inside the theatre, the audience witnesses the encounter between an elderly man, who took refuge in a radio station, and a young woman that suddenly reaches the same shelter, having listened to the man's radio transmissions. She has no name nor memory, only knows she needs to send a pewma, a dream-message. A half dramatic and half comical dialogue unfolds, looking for answers to the cause of the flood and for a way to calm nature's fury. Outside, the rain keeps falling and the waters keep rising, as told in an ancient Mapuche myth about the dangers of forgetting the good living. Forced by the growing river, the two characters abandon the radio station, and drag the confused audience with them. Outside, divided into two groups, the audience is invited to follow an oneiric storytelling tour throughout the surrounding area. Guided by other performers, they experience a different version of the city through walking, recorded audio content, augmented reality, encountering multiple dreams along the way. Back to the theatre for the final scene, the audience is asked to silently listen to the river. |
| Type Of Art | Performance (Music, Dance, Drama, etc) |
| Year Produced | 2025 |
| Impact | This is still under evaluation as the project is ongoing until April 30, 2026. |
| URL | http://www.fillkepewma.com |
| Title | Pu Pewma |
| Description | First public performance 'Pu Pewma' (January 2025) displaying urban Indigenous counter-narratives and critically addressing issues of whiteness and whitening and their relations to urban materialities in Santiago's city centre. |
| Type Of Art | Performance (Music, Dance, Drama, etc) |
| Year Produced | 2025 |
| Impact | The performance seeks to explore ways of engaging with urban landscapes that challenge whitening ideologies (blanqueamiento) through art. Inspired by the concept of pewma (dream), the involved Mapuche artists devised a site specific performance in public spaces of Santiago's city centre to share and collect dreams of decolonial urban futures, actively involving the audience in the artwork. This was a first experimental display of Pu Pewa, that is currently ongoing a process of reworking according to the feedback received and will be at the core of 9 events planned for June 2025, that will also include digital aspects. |
| Description | This research interrogates the key hypothesis that Latin American cities and related processes of urbanisation - as seen in the specific case of Santiago de Chile - can be understood as dispositive and infrastructures of whiteness challenged by Indigenous counter-narratives. Whiteness operates as a matrix of spatial, visual and epistemic order that structures hierarchies of visibility, mobility and legitimacy within the urban space. As such, the white city organises bodies and materialities, through operations that consolidate a spatial order in which Indigenous knowledge is systematically displaced from the visual, symbolic and political centre of urban space. 'Set in stone?' through a commitment to collaborative work, challenged colonial urban materiality and white ideologies, conceiving new ways of inhabiting and thinking about the city based on the recovery of Indigenous knowledge and experiences. Working collectively with artists from the Mapuche urban diaspora in Santiago and in partnership with the Epew Collective, a research and creative process was articulated around two fundamental elements of the Indigenous experience of the city: the Mapocho River that runs through Santiago, and the concept of pewma (dreams in Mapuzungun). If the white city and its spatial metabolism are sustained by fixed elements - stone, walls, boundaries, monuments - the river and dreams introduce the possibility of thinking about urban space from the perspective of the invisible, traces, currents, circulation, and interdependence. Moving from these two main interconnected elements, a radically different paradigm from that of monumentality, segmentation, and accumulation emerges, based on an epistemology that mobilises fluid and relations logics. The dream and the river operate as 'counter-infrastructures' that share an ontological and epistemic logic based on transit, interconnected temporalities, mobile memories, and the production of relations and connections that do not respond to the diagrams of the colonial and white order, allowing us to imagine and test alternative forms of urban production. Art -and particularly the two main results of this process, the performance and the installation FILLKE PEWMA - is proposed here not as a representational object, but as an experimental device that activates alternative models of inhabiting and producing the city from other languages, other materialities, and other epistemologies. Through the development of these artistic outputs, and related knowledge exchange and public engagement activities, the following main Key findings can be identified: • Significant new knowledge around the concept of 'whiteness as infrastructure' • Significant new knowledge around Indigenous urban epistemics • New and improved research methods through art-based and performative methods • New and improved research methods through digital technologies • Important new research questions opened up around Indigenous alternative urban futures • Particularly noteworthy new research collaboration with the Wereld Musuem Leiden (NL) and Indigenous diasporic organisations in Europe Please consider that the project is still active and will end on April 30, 2026, so this might need further details and updating. |
| Exploitation Route | The project adopted an anti-racist, anti-colonial, and collaborative stance, proposing artistic experimentation based on Indigenous concepts, epistemologies, and experiences. These forms of knowledge engage in dialogue, without being displaced, with contemporary digital technologies such as AR, digital platforms and installations, which allow the Mapuche territory to be materialised in the city, reproducing pewen (araucaria) forests in the midst of colonial architecture, audio narratives and counter-histories in the city centre, and mythical imaginaries that take us back to the future through a journey into the past. In this context, digital technologies were not introduced as simple tools, but as critical devices capable of making visible both the material, symbolic and political stratifications of the city, as well as other narratives and knowledge that comprise it, and are thus rendered visible. The research outcomes have the potential to be taken forward and put to use by other especially around: Theoretical contribution: - to debates around whiteness as infrastructure - to debates around Indigeneity and the urban - to Southern urbanism debates Methodological innovation: - around art-based methods - around research based use of digital technologies (including AR and mobile devices as instrument for public engagement) |
| Sectors | Communities and Social Services/Policy Digital/Communication/Information Technologies (including Software) Government Democracy and Justice Culture Heritage Museums and Collections Other |
| URL | http://www.fillkepewma.com |
| Description | The impact of the research is still to be assessed, as the project is ongoing until April 30, 2026. However, preliminary findings indicate that significative impacts have been produced in the creative, cultural and societal sectors through knowledge exchange and public engagement activities in Chile, Spain, the Netherlands. Evidence comes from general public and audience feedback related to the mentioned activities, and the building of new collaborations during the project, e.g. the mentioned partnership with the Wereld Museum Leiden for key activities in Europe. |
| First Year Of Impact | 2025 |
| Sector | Culture, Heritage, Museums and Collections |
| Impact Types | Cultural Societal |
| Description | Artistic residency 'El RÃo' |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A formal working group, expert panel or dialogue |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | The artistic residency 'El Río' was organised and coordinated by the Fundación Colectivo Epew and the University of Sheffield and involved four young Mapuche artists in Santiago. The residency took place from October 2024 to January 2025, with two intensive periods of two weeks in October (beginning) and January (end) and virtual weekly meetings during November and December. Inspired by the Mapocho River, this activity sought to explore new ways of engaging with natural and urban landscapes that challenges whitening ideologies (Blanqueamiento) through art. The involved artists developed a personal project that was then included in the Pu Pewma performance. The Residency is listed here as an engagement activity but I would be more inclined to consider it as a new research methods that the is being developed within the project. Sadly, there is no option to include creative and practice-based methods in that section. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2024,2025 |
| Description | Cyanotype Workshop addressing the Indigenous concept of 'dreaming' in urban contexts. |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Public/other audiences |
| Results and Impact | This was a workshop led by one of the artists involved in the project with a neighbourhood association in Santiago city centre. The workshop thought them how to print using cyanotype techniques and natural materials collected in the area (mostly from the main park 'Parque Forestal'), while reflecting on the Indigenous notion of 'dreaming' (pewma) as a way of addressing reality otherwise. This sparked discussions and reflections about nature in urban areas, and different ways of understanding and leaving the urban based in Indigenous knowledges. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2025 |
| Description | Public debate with audience participating to the first performance 'Pu Pewma' |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Public/other audiences |
| Results and Impact | This was a public debate and feedback session held with the audience participating to the first public performance 'Pu Pewma' in January 2025, held at the local theatre 'Teatro del Puente' after the performance and involving the interested audience and the artists. The event involved PGR students at local universities, professionals working at the Pre-Columbian Art Museum in Santiago, theatre professional, and general audience, for a total of 20 participants. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2025 |