ART-TRIBUTE:Weaving and other Practices… Cecilia Vicuña

We are closing our Tribute with Cecilia Vicuña (22/7/1948- ), her work addresses pressing concerns of the modern world, including ecological destruction, human rights, and cultural homogenization. Born and raised in Santiago de Chile, she has been in exile since the early 1970s, after the military coup against elected president Salvador Allende. Vicuña began creating “precarious works” and quipus in the mid 1960s in Chile, as a way of “hearing an ancient silence waiting to be heard.” Her multi-dimensional works begin as a poem, an image that morphs into a film, a song, a sculpture, or a collective performance. 

By Efi Michalarou

Cecilia Vicuna was born in Santiago, Chile. She is the daughter of Jorge Vicuna Lagarrique, an attorney, and Norma Ramirez Arenas, a tour guide. A visual artist and a poet, she began painting at an early age, and her first poems appeared in a bilingual quarterly out of Mexico City in 1967. She studied art at the Universidad de Chile from 1966 to 1971, and in 1972 she moved to London to pursue postgraduate studies at the Slade School of Fine Arts. In 1966, while still in college, she created the series “Basuritas” (Little garbage), the first example of what she calls “precarious art”, ephemeral sculptures and installations made with strings, branches, and textiles. In 1967 she founded Tribu No, a collective of artists who wrote poetry, issued manifestos, and performed public actions in Santiago. In 1971 Vicuña filled a room of the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in Santiago with leaves piled three feet high, naming the piece “Otoño”. In 1973 she moved to London after receiving a British Council Scholarship to complete a master of fine arts degree in painting at the Slade School of Fine Art. The military coup that deposed Salvador Allende (1970-73) led the artist, who had been a member of the leftist coalition Unidad Popular, to seek asylum in England, where she lived until 1975. There Vicuña published her first book of poems, “Saborami” (1973). In 1974 she founded—with the British art critic and curator Guy Brett, the Filipino artist David Medalla and the American artist John Dugger the Artists for Democracy, an organization of artists who opposed authoritarian regimes. In 1975 she moved to Bogotá, where she continued her studies of popular indigenous art and collaborated with the Corporación Colombiana de Teatro also she directed her first documentary film, “Qué es para usted la poesía?” (1980). Vicuña’s “Quipu” (translated as “knot”) works reinvent the ancient Andean system that recorded statistics and narratives through the knotting of colored thread. Historically, the quipu has been regarded as a  simple bureaucratic device, but research demonstrates they represented a complex system of knowledge with symbolic and virtual dimensions of enormous existential and social value that connected communities. Addressing this larger paradigm, Vicuña constructs her “Quipus” as poems in space. These tactile representations of the expansive interconnection of the cosmological and human realms relate her work to the Quantum Poetics movement that seeks to describe a reality that does not conform to standard perception.  At its core her work is poetical and philosophical rather than anthropological. Vicuna’s use of dyed, raw and unprocessed wool, coiled in “Caracol Azul” or suspended as in “Quipu Viscera”  ( both 2017), creates a visual meditation on the liminal spaces between life and death, humans and nature, the past and the present, represented in the diffuse fibrous strands of wool. With our mutual fate now in question as we venture into the Anthropocene. This cosmological connection is evident in another sculptural series, “Lo Precario”. Each component (found  scraps of cloth, shards of plastic, a feather, a leaf, a butterfly, a pencil) is included for its formal and representational potential. This gives each object infinite complexity on its own, a synecdoche of the larger installation as a whole, meant to be interpreted as a constellation. Originally, Vicuña composed these along the ocean’s shores, intended to disintegrate and wash away with high tide right after creation. She continues to perform this ritual in waterways around the world, while also bringing them indoors to display  on walls and in vitrines, where the fragility of the composition and materials warns of their precarity. Like her “Quipus” her paintings refer to Latin American history, in this case the points of first contact between the Spanish and indigenous people when Incan artists were forcibly converted to Catholicism and enlisted to paint and worship European religious icons. They nevertheless found ways to subvert the rulers by incorporating their own cultural iconography and worldviews into the renderings. These early South American, Christian paintings are a tangible visualization of the miscegenation that defined the colonial period, where fusing one’s way of life with the alien form imposed upon them was required for survival. Vicuña similarly adopts this method by using this colonial style of image making, but incorporating revolutionary iconography. A return to the past, in order to understand and transform the future.