Guillermo Bert

How do we preserve tradition and identity in a digital age? How do we...tell and preserve

stories in ways that might connect to youth, without abandoning the oral traditions that have worked for generations?

–Guillermo Bert

This collaboration by Guillermo Bert, a Los Angeles–based Chilean artist, and Anita

Paillamil, a Mapuche weaver living in southern Chile, features a QR code as the central design element. When the code is scanned with a reader on a smartphone, it opens a portal to an audio story read by Mapuche poet Graciela Huinao. Bert explains:

Using codes raises issues of data storage, information exchange, and the protection of identity. With this new technology, our identities are digitized and, in the process, may be stolen or lost—parallel, perhaps, to the identities lost by Indigenous peoples or immigrants. This project intends to poetically reverse this process, using codes to symbolically reclaim and restore identity.

–Kate Irvin, curator of costume and textiles