Luis Alberto Achondo Parra

This project investigates Mapuche emplacement in urban Santiago, Chile’s capital. As the largest Indigenous nation in the country, the Mapuche understand place as co-produced through dynamic relationships among humans, non-humans, and the environment. Indigeneity for the Mapuche emerges not only through public articulations of identity but also through emplacement—the embodied, sensory immersion in and relational connection to the environment. Their ecological knowledge is rooted in an interplay of sensory experiences, environmental relations, and cosmological connections within the mapu (land and ecosystem). However, structural racism, land dispossession, poverty, and environmental degradation have driven large-scale migration of Mapuche people to Santiago, disrupting centuries of emplacement in Wallmapu, their southern ancestral territories. Santiago—a noisy, congested, overdeveloped, polluted city with few green spaces—presents a stark contrast to the lush rural ecosystems the Mapuche have historically inhabited. Despite this, ecological concerns, sensations, and relations remain central to their ways of being and thinking. In the context of an escalating environmental crisis and Santiago’s biophysical inhospitality, this project examines the symbiotic relationship between sensation, ecological knowledge, and urban space, asking: How does Mapuche emplacement function amid the ecological precarity of Santiago?