PRESENTATION: Cecilia Vicuña-Brain Forest Quipu
Born and raised in Santiago, Cecilia Vicuña went into exile during the early 1970s after the violent military coup against President Salvador Allende. This sense of impermanence, and a desire to preserve and pay tribute to the country’s indigenous history and culture have characterised her career, spanning half a century. Vicuña’s ephemeral and environmentally conscious work combines the tactile ritual of weaving with assemblage, poetry, performance, and painting.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Tate Archive
“Brain Forest Quipu” by Cecilia Vicuña is the seventh annual Hyundai Commission for the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern. Woven together two monumental new sculptures from an array of different materials, they hang 27 metres from the ceiling and are positioned at opposite ends of the Turbine Hall. These sculptures are combined with audio and digital installations to form Vicuña . The quipu (also written as khipu) is an ancient recording and communication system. It was used by the Quechua people of the Andes from 2500 BCE through to the 16th century at the time of the Spanish conquest. Quipu means ‘knot’ in the Quechua language and consisted of a long textile cord from which hung multiple strands knotted into different formations and in different colors that were able to encode as much complex information as the alphabet. Although the exact meanings behind the knot formations are not now known, it is thought that they were used to record statistics, poems and stories, thereby creating a tactile relationship to memory and the imaginary. Cecilia Vicuña has been exploring and transforming the quipu in her work for over five decades. The knots and materials are unlike the traditional form but inspired by it. Vicuña’s quipus work conceptually as poems, performance, and film, where a word, a gesture, or a group becomes a knot. The installation “Brain Forest Quipu” brings together different strands of Cecilia Vicuña delicate sculptural forms, her sound work, her activism for Indigenous peoples and environmental causes, and her pioneering work with the Andean tradition of the quipu. The installation is an act of mourning for the destruction of forests, the subsequent impact on climate change, and the violence against Indigenous people. The pale, bone-white quipu sculptures in the Turbine Hall contain a complex variety of materials, including unspun wool, plant fibres, rope and cardboard. These are interspersed with found objects like small clay pipes and pottery fragments, which were collected from the banks of the Thames by women from local Latin American communities. The ghostly skeletal forms of these quipus stand for the dead forests and embody the delicate forces of the ecosystem, while their textures and colors evoke the bleached tree bark of forests killed by drought or intentional fire, as well as other dried-out natural substances like bone and snakeskin. Their interwoven structures also suggest deeper connections between the personal and the universal, from the mysterious grey matter of our brains to the awesome cosmology of deep time and outer space. A soundscape is played from speakers within each sculpture. Vicuña worked with composer Ricardo Gallo on the collection of compositions, which are woven together from new improvised recordings by Vicuña, Gallo and other artists, traditional Indigenous music, field recordings of nature, and periods of contemplative silence. Sound Q a Digital Q , created from the videos of Indigenous activists and land defenders, which is shown under the Turbine Hall bridge and on screens found on concourses throughout Tate Modern, as well as online.
Photo: Hyundai Commission: Cecilia Vicuña: Brain Forest Quipu Installation View at Tate Modern 2022. Photo © Tate Photography, Sonal Bakrania
Info: Curators: Catherine Wood and Hellen O’Malley, Tate Modern, Bankside, London, England, Duration: 11/10/2022-16/4/2023, Days & Hours: Daily 10:00-18:00, www.tate.org.uk/
