Cecilia Vicuña

Cecilia Vicuña is a Chilean artist, poet, performer, filmmaker and activist. Born in Santiago de Chile in 1948, she has spent more than fifty years moving between visual art, poetry and political action.

Her life and work are closely tied to Chilean history. The 1973 military coup against Salvador Allende forced her into exile and left a lasting mark on her practice. The dictatorship, the memory of the desaparecidos and the experience of displacement remain present in her work. Yet calling Vicuña simply a political artist would miss much of what makes her work distinctive.

In 2022, she received the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the 59th Venice Biennale. The award recognised a career that has brought poetry, Indigenous knowledge, feminism and ecological thought into contemporary art without turning them into fixed themes or easy slogans.

Cecilia Vicuña and the quipu

The quipu is one of the central forms in Cecilia Vicuña’s work. In Andean cultures, quipus used cords and knots to store and transmit information. Vicuña returns to this ancient form, but she does not treat it as an archaeological object. For her, the quipu is still alive.

Her installations often use wool, thread or raw fibres suspended across large spaces. Viewers do not stand outside the work. They walk beside it, beneath it or through it. Memory is therefore not presented as something that can be read from a distance. It becomes a physical experience.

Some of Vicuña’s quipus have no knots. They cannot preserve a complete record. Instead, they point towards what has vanished or has been deliberately erased. The missing knots may evoke Indigenous histories destroyed by colonialism, the victims of Latin American dictatorships or landscapes disappearing through climate change.

Poetry, ecology and disappearance

Ecology in Vicuña’s work is never separate from politics. The destruction of glaciers, rivers and forests is connected to extraction, colonial violence and the loss of Indigenous languages and knowledge.

She often works with fragile materials such as loose wool, sticks, stones, feathers, dust and objects found on the ground. These materials may appear temporary, almost ready to disappear. Their weakness is also their force. They resist the monumentality and permanence traditionally associated with art.

Poetry is equally important. Vicuña breaks words apart, joins them together and allows sound, gesture and misunderstanding to create new meanings. A word can become an image, an object or a political act. Language is not used to explain the work. It is one of its materials.