Cecilia Vicuña (born 1948) is a Chilean poet and artist based in New York and Santiago, Chile.
Her work is noted for themes of language, memory, dissolution, extinction and exile. Critics also note the relevance of her work to the politics of ecological destruction, cultural homogenization, and economic disparity, particularly the way in which such phenomena disenfranchise the already powerless. Her commitment to feminist forms and methodologies is considered to be a unifying theme across her diverse body of work, among which her fibre art quipus, knotted or unknotted strings, palabrarmas and precarios, made from natural, delicate materials, stand out. Her practice has been specifically linked to the term eco-feminism.
Cecilia Vicuña was distinguished with Premio Velázquez de Artes Plásticas 2019, Spain's most prominent art award and given out by the Spanish Ministry of Culture to an artist based in the country or from the Ibero-American Community of Nations. The jury statement said that she is receiving the award for her "outstanding work as a poet, visual artist and activist" and her "multidimensional art that interacts with the earth, written language, and weaving.". The same year she was an invited guest artist to the physics laboratory CERN.
Early life and education Cecilia Vicuña was born in Santiago de Chile in 1948 and raised in La Florida, in the Maipo valley. Vicuña is the granddaughter of Carlos Vicuña Fuentes, and the niece of , Rosa Vicuña, Teresa Vicuña and Eliana Navarro. Vicuña is the cousin of the photographer Leonora Vicuña.
From 1957 to 1964, she learned English at St Gabriel's English School and made large abstract paintings at her first studio built by her father in their garden. In 1966, she attended architecture school at the University of Chile in Santiago but switched to the fine arts school. In 1967 she founded the "Tribu No" and the Mexican magazine El Corno Emplumado published her first poem. Her first poem was published when she was 18.
She received her MFA from the University of Chile in 1971 and moved to London with a British Council Award in 1972 to attend the Slade School of Fine Art. In 1973 she went into exile in London following the death of President Salvador Allende and the 1973 Chilean coup d'état led by General Augusto Pinochet, she remained in London.
Career
While exiled in London, Vicuña largely focused on political activism, demonstrating in peaceful protests against fascism and human rights violations in Chile and other countries. She is a founding member of Artists for Democracy and organized the Arts Festival for Democracy in Chile at the Royal College of Art in 1974.
In 1975, Vicuña left London and moved to Bogotá, Colombia to conduct independent research into indigenous art and culture. She traveled throughout the country, Venezuela and Brazil. In Bogotá she was invited by Teatro La Candelaria and Corporación Colombiana de Teatro to create stage designs. In 1980, Vicuña moved to New York City and married César Paternosto. In the 80's she exhibited her work at MoMA, the Alternative Museum, and the Center for Inter American Relations in New York. In the 1990s, Vicuña had several solo exhibitions in the United States, such as "Precarious," a solo exhibition at Exit Art, New York (1990); "El Ande Futuro," a solo exhibition at the University Art Museum, Berkeley, California (1992); and "Cloud-Net," a solo travelling exhibition at Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center, Buffalo, NY (1998), DiverseWorks Artspace, Houston, Texas, and Art in General, New York, NY (1998).
She was interviewed for the 2010 film !Women Art Revolution.
In 2018, Vicuña became the Princeton University Art Museum's 2018 Sarah Lee Elson International Artist-in-Residence. As part of her residency, Vicuña performed with Colombian pianist Ricardo Gallo.
In 2022, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum hosted Vicuña's first solo exhibition in a major New York museum. At the age of 74, Cecilia Vicuña presented Spin Spin Triangulene, an exhibition which showcases a wide array of paintings that span the artists career, site-specific quipu installations and films. Vicuña's commission Brain Forest Quipu for the Turbine Hall building at Tate Modern was unveiled to the public in 2022.
In 2024, the Pérez Art Museum Miami organized the one-person exhibition of her installation Quipu Gut (2017), acquired by the museum in 2019. Quipu Gut is part of Vicuña's quipu body of work that responds to Andean native worldviews and feminist aesthetics in relation to earth work. Commissioned by and exhibited at Documenta 14, Kassel. Quipu Gut expands on Quipu Menstrual (2006) and Quipu Womb (2017).
Performance Cecilia Vicuña Vicuña was the founder of Tribu No and author of the No Manifesto, that created art actions in Santiago de Chile from 1967 to 1972.
In 1979, while living in Bogotá, Vicuña performed El Vaso de Leche (The Glass of Milk) in which she gathered an audience and spilled a glass of white paint to protest the deaths of an estimated 1,920 children due to contaminated milk. The company responsible had mixed fillers like paint into the milk to maximize their profits.
She performs her poetry internationally, frequently in conjunction with exhibitions or art installations, and documents her performances in videos and on the Vicuña audio page at Pennsound, and in the 2012 collection Spit Temple: The Selected Performances of Cecilia Vicuna which includes transcriptions, commentary, and audience commentaries.
Publications Vicuña has written and published twenty two books of her visual art installations and poetry. Her writing has been translated into several languages. These include Saboramí (1973), the first book testimony of the Military Coup in Chile, documenting the death of Salvador Allende, The Precarious/Precario (1983), Cloud Net (2000), Instan (2002) and Spit Temple (2010), a collection of her oral performances. In 1966, for one of her most experimental books, El Diario Estúpido, Vicuña wrote 7,000 words a day, recording her emotions and experiences. In 2009, she co-edited the Oxford Book of Latin American Poetry with Ernesto Livon Grosman, an anthology of 500 years of Latin American Poetry, which the Washington Post called "magisterial."
Poetry Saborami. Cullompton, United Kingdom: Beau Geste Press, 1973. Siete Poemas. Bogotá, Colombia: Ediciones Centro Colombo Americano, 1979. Precario/Precarious. New York, NY: Tanam Press, 1983. Luxumei o El Traspié de la Doctrina. Mexico City, Mexico: Los Libros del Fakir #33, Editorial Oasis, 1983. PALABRARmas. Buenos Aires, Argentina: Ediciones El Imaginero, 1984. Samara. Valle del Cauca, Colombia: Ediciones Embalaje del Museo Rayo, 1986. La Wik'uña. Santiago, Chile: Francisco Zegers Editor, 1990. Unravelling Words & the Weaving of Water. Minneapolis, MN: Graywolf Press, 1992. PALABRARmas/ WURWAPPINschaw. Edinburgh, Scotland: Morning Star Publications, 1994. La realidad es una línea. Kortrijk, Belgium: Kanaal Art Foundation, 1994. Word & Thread. Edinburgh, Scotland: Morning Star Publications, 1996. The Precarious: The Art & Poetry of Cecilia Vicuña / QUIPOem. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1997. cloud-net. New York, NY: Art in General, 1999. El Templo. New York, NY: Situations, 2001. Instan. Berkeley, CA: Kelsey St. Press, 2002. i tu. Buenos Aires, Argentina. Tsé-Tsé, 2004. Palabrarmas. Santiago, Chile: RIL Editores, 2005. Sabor A Mí. Santiago, Chile: Ediciones Universidad Diego Portales, 2007. V. Lima, Peru: tRope, 2009. Soy Yos: Antología, 1966-2006. Santiago, Chile: Lom Ediciones, 2011. Saborami. Philadelphia, PA: ChainLinks, 2011. Chanccani Quipu. New York, NY: Granary Books, 2012. Spit Temple. Brooklyn, NY: Ugly Duckling Press, 2012. Slow Down Fast, A Toda Raja, Berlin:Errant Bodies Press: DOORMATS8, 2019.
Selected essays
"The Coup came to kill what I loved," in Spare Rib, #28, London 1974. "Para Contribuir a la Memoria," in La Bicicleta, #24, Santiago de Chile, 1982. "Quatro Donne in Latinoamerica," Anno V, #13, Roma, Italia, 1984. "The No, at the Latinoamerica Despierta Conference," Massachusetts College of Art, Boston, 1989. (Published as "Transcript of Remarks" in Being America, by Rachel Weiss, White Pine Press, New York, 1991.) "The Invention of Poverty," in America the Bride of the Sun, Royal Museum, Amberesm Belgium, 1992. "The Third Stone," in The Guardian, London, Nov. 26, 1996. "Poetry and string theory, a conversation with James O'Hern," Riffing on Strings, edited by Sean Miller & Shveta Verma, Scriblerus Press, 2008. "Organizar la ensonacion, en Artists for Democracy: El Archivo de Cecilia Vicuna," Museo de la Memoria y los Derechos Humanos, Museo National de Bellas Artes, Santiago, Chile, 2014.
Edited volumes Martin Adan, The Cardboard House. Minneapolis, MN: Graywolf Press (The Palabra Sur Series of Latin American Literature), 1988. Rosario Castellanos, The Selected Poems of Rosario Castellanos. Minneapolis, MN: Graywolf Press, 1988. Adolfo Bioy Casares, A Plan for Escape. Minneapolis, MN: Graywolf Press (The Palabra Sur Series of Latin American Literature), 1988. Vicente Huidobro, Altazor. Minneapolis, MN: Graywolf Press (The Palabra Sur Series of Latin American Literature), 1988. Ül: Four Mapuche Poets. Pittsburgh, PA: Latin American Review Press, 1998. The Oxford Book of Latin American Poetry. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2009.
Visual art Quipus Vicuña has become increasingly recognized for her works featuring raw wool and other fibers, dyed crimson and suspended or draped overhead. Viewers and critics often react to the works as evocative of blood. Vicuña refers to these fiber installations as quipus, referencing the indigenous writing systems suppressed by Spanish colonizing forces. Unlike transportable pre-Columbian quipus, Vicuña's quipus are integrated into the landscape or the gallery in which they appear. Vicuña referred to her first quipu as the "quipu that remembers nothing," it was an empty cord as well as her first precario.
Objects Vicuña creates "precarious works" characterized by her use of materials that are often fragile, worn by the elements and/or biodegradable: a return to the environment. She describes her work as a way of "hearing an ancient silence waiting to be heard." In 1966, she began creating sculptural interventions called precarios, combining ritual and assemblage using typically throw-away materials such as yarn, sticks, feathers, leaves, stones and bones. Between June 24, 1973-August 1974, she created over 400 precarios as an act of political resistance in response to General Pinochet's military coup of President Salvador Allende. This series of precarios were called A Journal of Objects for the Chilean Resistance. The 12 books of the journal are now in the collection of the Tate Gallery in London.
Films Vicuña has an extensive filmography, having created documentaries, video poems and site specific video installations. In 1980 she made the film ¿Qué es para Usted la Poesía/ What is Poetry to you? while in Bogotá, Colombia, the work is now part of the collection of the Museum of Modern Art. In 2010 her film Kon Kon was released, it follows Vicuña to Con Con Chile where the sea is dying and an ancient tradition is being destroyed. Vicuña has had a long collaboration with American filmmaker Robert Kolodny, with whom she has created dozens of films with. Some of Vicuña and Kolodny's collaborations include La Noche de la Especies, a video animation based on a myriad of drawings and poems by Vicuña, Disappeared Quipu which appeared as the video portion of the show by the same name at the Brooklyn Museum and MFA Boston in 2018 and Death of the Pollinators which tells the story of the death of the Earth's pollinating insects and originally screened as part of Insectageddon at the High Line in New York City.
Installations