Gualicho

Gualicho is a visual project exploring identity, memory, and territory through Uruguay’s native forest. It approaches it as a living archive where ancestral and contemporary layers meet, reclaiming Gualicho as a protective symbol against loss and erasure.

What does it mean to see the native forest as a living archive?
Gualicho is an ongoing visual project that explores the tensions between identity, memory, and territory through the relationship with the Uruguayan forest. This landscape, often neglected and fragmented, reveals itself as a living archive where the ancestral and the contemporary intertwine.

Amid inherited knowledge and silent resistances emerges Gualicho, an invoked presence originating from Mapuche-Tehuelche cosmologies. Conceived as a spiritual force connected to the land and the destiny of communities, it could bring misfortune but also commanded respect and protection through ritual practices. In Uruguay, its figure extended to forests, hills, and grasslands, entering popular imagination as an entity that both threatened and protected. Colonization degraded its name, erasing its connection to the land and its communal role.

Recovering Gualicho from this perspective reclaims it as a symbol of persistence: an invocation that restores protective power to the native forest and to the communities striving to preserve their memory and rootedness. The project invites reflection on the forest not only as landscape, but as a refuge of memories, tensions, and collective narratives.

How can we recognize and protect what is disappearing?