"...Vicuña’s own voice has the timbre of an ancient oracle, a whisper from the spirits, in its softness and purity."

It’s a curious coincidence that artist Cecilia Vicuña shares a name with the Andean camelid. The mini-skinny llama, heralded in Incan folklore as a reincarnated maiden with an untouchable coat of pure gold (and whose prized fur was worn solely by royalty), today remains reserved only for the rich. Vicuñas are a mythologized creature turned exploited subject, a harbinger for the destruction Vicuña herself is possessed to alert others.

But fibers aren’t the sole thread of connection in common with Vicuña, herself known best for her woven-wool Quipu sculptures. It’s the trans-Atlantic journey the surname took to become hers: adapted from Quechua, taken into parlance in Habsburg Spain, and then returned back to South America where colonized Indigenous peoples absorbed the customs of their imposed rule. Much like her name, she is made of the carried connection between ancient lands and legends with New World displacement.

Hyundai Commission: Cecilia Vicuna: Brain Forest Quipu Installation View at Tate Modern 2022.

Photo © Tate (Ben Fisher Photography)

Vicuña, now 74, is from Santiago, Chile, herself of Indigenous Diaguita descent as well as from a family of matriarchal artists and intellectuals. She sees her art as belonging in the cosmos and connecting the past to the future. It’s not surprising then that Vicuña rejects the West’s intervention in the Americas, which disrupted its natural order.

Vicuña often cites a moment on the Pacific beach in Concón as a 17 year old, as she was marking the sand, where the wind wrapped around her waist, making her aware that nature was feeling her. “The wind knew I was there, the ocean knew I was there,” she likes to say, “Everything is aware. My awareness is possible because everything is aware.” That her feet were blackened by tar coming off oil refineries on Chile’s coast was, too, prophetic, setting her up for a life pursuit with nature, as a natural being.

It was then that Vicuña’s practice solidified—even though her mother always told Vicuña that she was an artist well before she could speak. Vicuña makes art not only as a studio practice but as an extension of life’s essence, a necessary pursuit; and one absent of the self, especially the ego. “My process is not thinking,” she often imparts, “My process is sensing, attending to that that is around us.” Quite literally. Vicuña says what she’s doing is listening, to the earth, the cosmos, and most importantly, water. “I want to bring this awareness that the sacred landscape was still alive, still with us, still speaking to us if we just listen to it,” she said in her 2020 Hugo Boss Prize interview.

Hyundai Commission: Cecilia Vicuna: Brain Forest Quipu Installation View at Tate Modern 2022.

Photo © Tate (Ben Fisher Photography)

Listening is her medium. It’s then articulated and given form through wide-range of practices.

She makes quipus—the knots of time—the recording devices of the Incas that have a numeric and alphabetic system imbued in its hanging wool threads, and embeds them with debris and other detritus. “To Andeans, unspun wool is like cosmic gas, where life is born,” she has said. Vicuña paints otherworldly surreal canvases, taking her technique from an encounter with Leonora Carrington, and frames her paintings as torchbearers of the 17th-century Cuzco School, a painting movement marked by its subversive resistance to Catholic conversion. Her performance works encompass her poetry and political gestures. To this day, Vicuña’s political slogans are still seen at global protests, including “maximum fragility against maximum power.”

Whether poetry, painting, protest or Precarios, Vicuña is giving voice to the ineffable and impermanence. It’s befitting that Vicuña’s own voice has the timbre of an ancient oracle, a whisper from the spirits, in its softness and purity. Her work isn’t so much about expression (that would be individualist) as it is a form of communication.

But it took a while for the art world to listen. Only in 2018, at the age of 70, was she added to the blue-chip roster of Lehmann Maupin. That said, Vicuña wasn’t exactly living in isolation, and she doesn’t sit comfortably in the current curatorial framing of an “overlooked artist.” Her first book of poetry was published when she was 18 (and she’s had 25 volumes printed to date), and she had a solo museum exhibition of paintings in 1971 at Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Santiago. She’s won the Andy Warhol and Pollock-Krasner grant awards, had residencies at McDowell and the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center, and had over 40 solo exhibitions (and too many group show inclusions to tally).

Vicuña went to the Slade School of Art in the early 1970s (in exile from Pinochet’s despotic reign of Chile), then felt the Amerindian pull back to South America, landing in Bogotá for a stint, proclaiming the city “far from Santiago, but the same spine.” In the seventies, her work transformed from the aesthetic movements of Modernism and Abstraction that she was so taken as a young artist to rejecting Western conventions, living as a radical, connecting the cosmos and community to art making, and politics to poetry.

Hyundai Commission: Cecilia Vicuna: Brain Forest Quipu Installation View at Tate Modern 2022.

Photo © Tate (Ben Fisher Photography)

Then she settled in New York in 1980, wherein she moved into the converted Tribeca loft where she still lives today. Vicuña was immersed in the feral, electric Manhattan artist community, befriending Edwin Torres and Amiri Baraka, and Lucy Lippard who welcomed her into the Heresies Collective, alongside Lorraine O’Grady and Ana Mendieta. Her work was mostly shown in experimental spaces, academic settings, or group shows on Latin American artists throughout the 1990s and 2000s.

It was in New York where Vicuña made a daily ritual of walking down to the Hudson River, collecting debris, trash and scraps of nature and forming together little sculptures on the banks, eventually taken by the tide, but just momentarily united objects as one. This practice is part of an underscoring principle to Vicuña’s art making, and that’s lo precario, or arte precario, that become precarios. In Spanish, precario is directly translated as precarious, but the word also means fragile or uncertain. Vicuña began deploying that word to describe her drawings in the sand that the ocean washed away. In turn, lo precario acknowledges the precariousness of life, of being, of beauty, or as Vicuña calls it: “that we are dying as we live.”

And so it’s peculiar that in the mid-2010s Vicuña became the art world star she is today. Her practice has never been geared toward popular tastes or participating in the system. In 2022 alone, Vicuña has been awarded the Golden Lion prize at the 59th Venice Biennale, the summer solo exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum, and the Hyundai Commission at Tate’s Turbine Hall. As an artist who records and rejects time, these last few years have been in exercise in stretching it (including to meet the capitalist demand to feed her market). Though only after joining Lehmann Maupin in 2018 was she able to have her first stand-alone studio, Vicuña isn’t persuaded by the material. She dresses in a mix of traditional Andean and practical weather-appropriate attire. Success, as the West defined it, isn’t part of her vocabulary. Still, this moment of recognition for Vicuña is a signal that people are finally listening.

Hyundai Commission: Cecilia Vicuna: Brain Forest Quipu Installation View at Tate Modern 2022.

Photo © Tate (Ben Fisher Photography)

Is it because of Vicuña that others are finally hearing the murmurs of the earth, its cries for help? Or are others finally realizing the destruction the non-Indigneous have caused and found their way to Vicuña? Interestingly, her work often gets labeled as “kaleidoscopic,” and it’s true that Vicuña echoes the ever-shifting fractals of ideas, information, and ideals she finds from listening, as after all, the diversity of nature should be treated accordingly. We’re in a moment of a broader awakening to all that Vicuña’s offerings have long been directing attention. As Vicuña said to a room of VIPs during the 2022 Venice vernissage, “This is the time for all of us to put our hearts, our money, our everything in the service of the healing of this earth. And that is the main art.”