Medium Füun
Royal College of Art, London, 2018
As part of the Royal College of Art final project, Medium was a year-experimental exploration of the vertical surface as a ‘medium’ at an architectural scale—operating between the worlds of the real and supernatural, material and virtual, digital and crafted, past and present.
FÜUN is a spatial installation for a speculative museographic context, enacted by light projections, sound and large-scale cast surfaces as performative devices. The installation presents alternative narratives around native women in South America, particularly through the study and collaboration with Mapuche female artists, exploring textile art and poetry as mediums to their cosmology and feminine world-views. By building a parallel between poetry and textile art as rich forms of poetic communication, the installation aims to translate its narratives through a multi-sensory experience rather than vitrines and enclosed displays. The installation presented Mapuche’s culture in a dynamic and contemporary mixed-media context rather than the static historical museum mediations of indigenous identities. The sculptural surfaces create a liminal space for new conversations to emerge around space, materials, digital tools and decolonizing the museum narratives from feminist discourses.
The piece seeks for new encounters and kissings between materiality and new media. Using casting as a technique to search for the ghost that lives in the surface—the void of the memories that have been displaced— the installation experiments with the material transformations of 2D and 3D surfaces, from textile patterns to mutated material sculptures. The digitally rendered sculptures cast in large-scale Jesmonite surfaces are charged with encoded layers of information projected back to the space through projection mapping, interacting with a sound landscape, a sculptural seat and a publication with poems in Spanish, Mapudungün and English. The poems in the space were written and narrated by Mapuche poets Faumelisa Manquepillán and Graciel Huinao, and were reworked in atmospheric soundscapes by Yaprak Göker and voiceover english performance by Jane de Florez.
Installation at Royal College of Art, Final Show, 2018
Poets and voice - Faumelisa Manquepillán, Graciela Huinao
English voice - Jane de Florez
Translator - William Gregory
Sound designer - Yaprak Göker
Special thanks to Faumelisa Manquepillán for her wisdom and open collaboration form the South of Chile in the process of this project. See her work here and here.
Graciela and Faumelisa’s poems can be found in her individual books and also in the collective Mapuche female poetry publication Hilando en la Memoria.