Spain's International Contemporary Art Fair

A collective work on Wichí textiles, with a member from Santa Cruz, arrived at Spain's ARCO Fair

The 44th edition of ARCOmadrid took place from March 5-9, 2025, in the Spanish capital, with the Amazon as its central project, uniting the past and the future through the galleries and their essential relationship with artists and collectors. Eight Argentine proposals were selected, including one from the Tsufwelej Collective, featuring artist Fidela Flores from the Wichí community; renowned designer Martín Churba; and Candelaria Aaset from Rio Gallegos, also in her role as cultural manager. From ENTRAMANDO on FM Dimensión, we spoke with two of the members about the collective, their works, their participation in the fair, and textile art in the Northwest.
ARCOmadrid, "Spain's International Contemporary Art Fair," is one of the leading contemporary art fairs on the international circuit. In its 2025 edition, the presence of Latin American galleries was once again prominent, focusing on its title, "Wamisté: Ideas for an Amazon Futurism." Of the 15 selected galleries, eight were Argentine, including the Latin American conceptual and contemporary art gallery Herlitzka & Co., which featured textile works by the Tsufwelej Collective at its booth.

"The name of the Tsufwelej collective has to do with a clasp, linked embraces," artists Churba and Aaset explain. "It describes the act of embracing and the textile stitch. The metaphor of textiles serves to write bonds of being like the weft." The collective connects ancestral memories with cosmic geometries of the Wichí people, using contemporary textile processes and imagery, transforming neo-ancestral chaguar weavings.
Candelaria Aaset was born and raised in Rio Gallegos. Her training took her to the Quebrada de Humahuaca, where she created UNCU, a space for artistic research rooted in the territory, where she currently develops work on design, art, and crafts. There, she met Fidela Flores, a weaver who develops her work from her community in the Chaco Salteño, integrating traditional Wichí art patterns.

From the Northwest region, both artists contacted and worked remotely, initially with Martin Churba, an iconic designer and artist from Buenos Aires, avant-garde in his collections and textile processes.

The collective's technique and work are based on the harvesting, spinning, and dyeing of both natural and artificial chaguar, a textile fiber that is in decline due to deforestation, which is woven using the yica stitch technique. “It's not a knot like macramé or loom weaving, it's a lacing, and from the weaving pattern that appears in some Wichí dances, the infinite dance, which makes us eternal, there's a pattern in that dance that also resembles the lacing.”

“These geometric patterns are representations of animals or plants, or creatures of the forest. Some have names like mulita's ear, carancho's claw, or owl's eye. They have to do with abstract geometry and recognition, mentioning and remembering those points,” Candelaria explains.

After a period of review and remote work, the weavings finally arrived at Martín Churba's workshop to continue with another process. “When I received them at the workshop, I felt a mixture of excitement and panic. I felt there was no need to touch the work; it was already a work. I raised with the collective this feeling of avoiding contamination of something pure, and Fidela ultimately encouraged us to do it.”

Finally, three anthropomorphic works were presented, woven in chaguar, dyed with natural dyes and acrylic paints, presenting different textures and silkscreen printing, giving them new meaning. They called them Opachin, which, they explain, is the name given to the technique of Wichí weavers.

Regarding the ARCOmadrid exhibition space, Churba states, "The window they offered us was spectacular; it was a moment to show something like this; the themes were linked to South America, nature, the Amazon. There's a feeling that we don't belong to that interior culture of the Americas, but the rivers reach all the way south; they're part of that language. It was a way of presenting something from the southern tip of the Americas."

And she concludes, "At one time, aesthetics, the visual, what pleased the eye, mattered more, but today other things happen. Knowing that ARCO's theme is South America, its ability to see the future, to understand its most original roots, is a very virgin part in terms of the contrast with the system, and what it feels like here, is an invitation to all artists, dreams, futurism, context, and signs that the planet is giving in nature and progress."

The works of the Tsufwelej collective have already been sold and have become part of the collections of the Miami-based Argentine businessman, Jorge Pérez, and others in collections based in London and Hong Kong.
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Spain's International Contemporary Art Fair