Many museums in the Global North and Chile report the presence of a Mapuche item called rewe in their collections. Roughly translated as shaman's post/pole, Museums usually describe them as carved, staggered wooden trunks with anthropomorphic figuration. However, can we bring a rewe into the Museum? This communication explores the politics of representation's limits and what exceeds it, centering on the spiritual dimension of these things to answer why rewe cannot be brought to Museums.
Rewe will be a study case to explore Museum relations to Mapuche material culture and the way the first assumes the latter represents and therefore shows culture. The communication will argue that what it is in Museums is purapurawe, a word for ladder, and that denotes the wood object people fabricate to compose a rewe later on. However, they are not like any purapurawe either. Because of how they became collections and the Museum's ontological capacity to transform their nature through representation and other techniques, they are a purapurawe living under colonial conditions.
Based on Mapuche's knowledge and intense collaboration with intellectuals and shamans, this communication will briefly outline a Mapuche regime of visibility/invisibility that complicates and multiplies the possibilities of what those beings can be in Museums, pointing to other possible lives for them. The intention is to complexify the immediate identity of items in collections, debating the Museum's ontological limits and transformational capacities. In doing so, the goal is to open a possible slot for decolonization, arguing for ways to relate and represent Mapuche material culture that is not-just-colonial.
