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Chanccani Quipu, 2012
Since 1966, Cecilia Vicuña has been working with quipus (‘quipu’ translates to ‘knot’ in Quechua). Created by the Incan and Andean communities prior to the arrival of Europeans, the quipu is a series of knotted cords, a system of language, or writing, meant to activate the memory and was used widely as a mode of knowledge sharing and exchange. Through the poetic, cosmological, corporeal significance of the quipu, as well as its implications as an act of anti-colonial resistance, the artist has continued to work with quipus for over five decades. She writes:
In the Andes people did not write, they wove meaning into textiles and knotted cords. Five thousand years ago they created the quipu (knot), a poem in space, a way to remember, involving the body and the cosmos at once. A tactile, spatial metaphor for the union of all. The quipu, and its virtual counterpart, the ceque system of sightlines connecting all communities in the Andes, were banished after the Conquest. Quipus were burnt, but the vision of interconnectivity, a poetic resistance endures underground.
The “quipu that remembers nothing,” an empty cord was my first precario (c. l966). Today, I continue to create metaphorical iterations of the quipu.
Symbiosis Ritual Battle, 2015
A cork, pins, rubber bands, wire, a chopstick: in this intimate video work, Cecilia Vicuña engages with the natural system of play, strife, and interaction in the natural world in the form of a silent puppet show. The exterior world comes to the table in the form of sounds of the passing traffic, horns and street noise. The work demonstrates the artist’s ability to activate the primal sense of play and joy with almost nothing.
SYMBIOSIS, RITUAL BATTLE is a video for artist Cecilia Vicuña in collaboration with conservation ecologist, Meredith Root-Bernstein. The project reaches across multiple knowledge traditions—art and science, biological concept and Andean ritual—to illustrate reciprocal exchange and the importance of play in sharing ideas across disciplines.
Cecilia Vicuña is a poet, artist, filmmaker and activist. Born and raised in Santiago, Chile, 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. She has been in exile since the early 1970s after the military coup against elected president Salvador Allende. Her work has been exhibited at: The Tate Modern in London, The Guggenheim Museum, MUAC, Mexico, The Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; The Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes de Santiago; The Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) London; Art in General in NYC; The Whitechapel Art Gallery in London; The Berkeley Art Museum; The Whitney Museum of American Art; and The Museum of Modern Art in New York. She received the Premio Velasquez in 2019 and the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the 59th Venice Biennale, 2022.
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