INSTALLATIONS / INSTALACIONES

Helen Molesworth, curating the exhibition Dance/Draw at the ICA Boston, 2011, called my work "site-specific performance installations".

How to call a work that exists in many dimensions at once?

I called my work arte precario (precarious), and the name disappeared along with the work.

I also refer to it as "Metaphors in Space", "Spatial Weavings", "StreetWeavings" or "Museum Weavings."

In my text "Impossible Weavings", I linked them to ancient practices around the world, where weaving in all the wrong places is a crucial symbolic act.

The precarios function simultaneously as performances and installations. In Otoño/Autumn, my first installation in an institution (1971), I blurred the difference between inside and outside by working in the street and in the museum at once.

Featured Installations

Casa Espiral (1966)
Otoño (1974)
Artists for Democracy (1974-2014)
Homage to Vietnam (1977)
Precario / Precarious (1990)
Hilumbres Allqa (1994)
Ceq'e Fragments (1994)
Wiñay Rutusqa (1996)
A Net of Holes (1997)
Cloud-Net (1999)
Semiya (2000)
Canoa de Luz (2001)
Dis Solving (2002)
Quipu Menstrual (2006)
Painted Ideas (2009)
Disolución (2009)
Water Weaving (2011-12)
Semiya / Frø Quipu (2015)

Casa Espiral (1966)

Con con, Chile

The first precarious works were done for high tide to erase.
Since then I pilgrim back to Con con periodically to create new iterations of this first piece.

Otoño (1971)

Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes
Santiago, Chile

Artists for Democracy (1974-2014)

Artists for Democracy (AFD) was founded on May 6th, 1974, in London by Cecilia Vicuña, David Medalla, John Dugger, and Guy Brett to organize The Arts Festival for Democracy in Chile and other projects of solidarity with liberation struggles around the world. AFD mobilized artists and intellectuals around the world, who responded to our call to donate and create art works to be auctioned in support of the Chilean struggle to restore democracy.

AFD took part in the historic rally organized by the British Joint Labour Movement and the Chile Solidarity Campaign in Trafalgar Square in London, on September 15, 1974. AFD contributed the banner Chile Vencerá by John Dugger. The rally protested the military coup against Salvador Allende in Chile on September 11, 1973, and was attended by 10,000 people.

The Arts Festival for Democracy in Chile was organized by volunteers and artists members of AFD. It presented symposia, performances and large installations at the Royal College of Art in London from October 14 - October 30, 1974. Among the many artists who participated were Roberto Matta, Julio Cortázar, Ariel Dorfman, Meret Oppenheim, Valie Export, Tina Keane, Christo, Claes Oldenburg, and David Hockney. Approximately 100 artworks donated to AFD in 1974 are now in the collection of the Museo de la Solidaridad Salvador Allende in Santiago.

*

The exhibition, Artists for Democracy: El Archivo de Cecilia Vicuña (Artists for Democracy, Cecilia Vicuña's archive), curated by Paulina Varas opened at the Museo de la Memoria y Los Derechos Humanos and El Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in Santiago, January-May 2014.

[click to download exhibition catalogue]

*

Additional resources:

Artists for Democracy, a video by Cecilia Vicuña

"A Conversation with Cecilia Vicuña: Artists For Democracy's ‘Future Archive'"

"Conversación con Cecilia Vicuña: El Archivo Futuro de Artists for Democracy"

Artists for Democracy: El Archivo de Cecilia Vicuña

"Artists for Democracy, El Archivo de Cecilia Vicuña," Museo de la Memoria y los Derechos Humanos

Chile Lucha, a film by Mike Leggett, documenting the rally in solidarity with Chile in Trafalgar Square, September 15, 1974.

detail from Artists for Democracy (1974)

Banner by John Dugger. Pictured at the podium are Joan Jara, Victor Jara's widow, and Hortensia Bussi de Allende, Allende's widow.

(Photo by John Dugger)

detail from Artists for Democracy (1974)

"Ruca Abstracta," or "Allende's Eyes," an installation by Cecilia Vicuña at the Arts Festival for Democracy in Chile, organized by AFD at the Royal College of Art, London, October 14, 1974.

See also the video Ruca Abstracta/Allende's Eyes

detail of "Ruca Abstracta" from Artists for Democracy (1974)

detail from Artists for Democracy (1974)

Zanu banner by John Dugger at the Arts Festival for Democracy in Chile, Royal College of Art, London, 1974.

detail from Artists for Democracy (2014)

"Taller de Basuritas," an installation by Cecilia Vicuña for the exhibition, "Artists for Democracy: El Archivo de Cecilia Vicuña" at the Museo de la Memoria y los Derechos Humanos, Santiago, Chile.

detail from Artists for Democracy (2014)

"Ruca Abstracta," or "Allende's Eyes," by Cecilia Vicuña, reconstructed for the exhibition, "Artists for Democracy: El Archivo de Cecilia Vicuña," at the Museo de la Memoria y los Derechos Humanos, Santiago, Chile.

Quipu de Lamentos, from Artists for Democracy (2014)

Sound installation by Cecilia Vicuña for the exhibition "Artists for Democracy: El Archivo de Cecilia Vicuña," at the Museo de la Memoria y los Derechos Humanos, Santiago, Chile. It was dedicated to the disappeared political prisoners of Chile.

Homage to Vietnam (1977)

May 25th - June 15
Fundación Gilberto Alzate Avendaño, Bogotá, Colombia

"Watching the news of the Vietnam War in Chile in the 1960's, I feared the same suffering would come to us. I tied a red handkerchief around my wrist until it was frayed and torn apart. After the victory of the Vietnamese people in 1975, I painted a set of silk and cotton banners in homage to their struggle."
--Cecilia Vicuña

detail from Homage to Vietnam (1977)

Download this text as a PDF [in Spanish]

detail from Homage to Vietnam (1977)

invitation from Homage to Vietnam (1977)

detail from Homage to Vietnam (1977)

Precario / Precarious (1990)

Exit Art Gallery
New York, NY

detail from Precario / Precarious (1990)

Hilumbres Allqa (1994)

Kanaal Art Foundation
Kortrijk, Belgium

A site specific installation at the Beguinage of Kortrijk, Belgium, Kanaal Art Foundation, l994, based on the Andean concept "Allqa", meaning "the union of black and white," which weavers practice to transform hate into love.

Hilumbres, a word created by the author combining thread and light in Spanish (hilo y lumbre).

During the preparatory work for the exhibition INSIDE THE VISIBLE* which opened at the ICA in Boston ((1996), Catherine de Zegher, Director of the Kanaal Art Foundation in Kortrijk, Belgium, invited Cecilia Vicuña to create a solo exhibition, a site specific installation at the Beguinage of Kortrijk.

The Beguinage is an architectural complex founded in 1238, which formerly housed beguines, lay religious women who lived in community without taking vows or retiring from the world. Weaving was one of their main activities.

Cecilia Vicuña wove the streets and gardens of the Beguinage, and occupied the three floors of the exhibition space in the main building of the compound.

*Inside the Visible, curated by Catherine de Zegher, was an international touring exhibition, shown at the Institute of Contemporary Art,Boston (Feb 1996); the Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, October-December 1996); The National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C. and The Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth in 1997.

detail from Hilumbres Allqa (1994)

detail of Hilumbres Allqa (1994)

Ceq'e Fragments (1994)

Center for Contemporary Arts
Santa Fe, New Mexico

Click to download exhibition pamphlet

Ceque: line (Quechua)

The ceque system of 41 imaginary (virtual) lines was a cosmographical map radiating outwards from Qurikancha, the Inca's Temple of the Sun, in Cuzco, connecting Andean communities to the sacred sources of water in the mountains.

Vicuña's film, quipu/ceque, focuses on the connection between the quipu and the ceque system.

detail from Ceq'e Fragments (1994)

IN side the VISIBLE (1996)

An international touring exhibition, curated by Catherine de Zegher, opened at the Institute of Contemporary Art, ICA Boston (Feb 1996); traveled to the Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, (October-December 1996);The National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington D.C; The Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth in 1997.

A historic survey of the Feminine in Twentieth-Century Art, Inside the Visible presented the work of women artists of vastly different backgrounds, including important yet previously "invisible" figures alongside the work of established artists to create a re-theorized interpretation of the art of this century.

The exhibition was named after IN side the VISIBLE, a poem by Cecilia Vicuña.

Wiñay Rutusqa (weaving in broken time), a site specific installation by Cecilia Vicuña, responded to the architecture of each museum, and was created in four different iterations, all of them called Winay Rutusqa: weaving in broken time, a Quechua expression used by Andean weavers referring to the way women's work is continually interrupted by the need to complete different tasks.

Press for IN side the VISIBLE

Links to Inside the Visible

- Interview with Catherine de Zegher

http://www.ktpress.co.uk/pdf/nparadoxaissue1_Katy-Deepwell_57-67.pdf

- The catalog

http://www.amazon.com/Inside-Visible-Elliptical-Traverse-Feminine/dp/0262540819

detail of Wiñay Rutusqa from IN side the VISIBLE (1996)
The Whitechapel Art Gallery
London, UK

detail of Wiñay Rutusqa from IN side the VISIBLE (1996)
The National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington D.C

detail of Wiñay Rutusqa from IN side the VISIBLE (1996)
ICA, Institute of Contemporary Arts, Boston

A Net of Holes (1997)

A site-specific installation at the Whitney Biennial Exhibition

Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

The installation was created in response to the arquitecture of the museum designed by Marcel Breuer. It consisted of a soft grid mirroring the hard grid of the ceiling. Constructed with alpaca wool, the web moved with people's breath.

Its empty container referred to the invisibility of indigenous peoples in the Americas, and was inspired by an anonymous Aztec poem recorded in 1528.

A page from North and South Connected: An Abstraction of The Americas, Cecilia de Torres, LTD

detail from A Net of Holes (1997)

Cloud-Net (1999)

Hallwalls, Buffalo, N.Y., Diverseworks, Houston, Texas, Art in General, New York.

Site-specific installation dedicated to protecting the earth from global warming.

detail from Cloud-Net (1999)

Hallwalls, Buffalo, N.Y., Diverseworks, Houston, Texas, Art in General, New York.

detail from Cloud-Net (1999)

Semiya (2000)

Gabriela Mistral, Galeria de Arte Contemporaneo
Consejo Nacional de la Cultura y las Artes
Santiago, Chile

Site-specific installation dedicated to the native seeds going extinct in Chile.

Click to download exhibition catalogue

LA SEMILLA ES UNA NAVE ESPACIAL ESPERANDO BROTAR

En 1971, Cecilia Vicuña propuso al entonces Presidente Salvador Allende, celebrar un Día de la Semilla. Sugería recoger y plantar semillas, convertir terrazas y techos en jardines; ciudades y campos en un vergel. Cuenta que Allende se rió y dijo, pensativo “Quizá para el año dos mil.”

“Ese año, mis obras “Otoño”, y “El quipu que no recuerda nada”, anunciaban el fin de los estábamos viviendo, el fin de un ciclo. Cuando quise hacer la contrapartida de ese trabajo, que era la semilla, la propuesta no germinó. Tuvieron que pasar casi 30 años para que una nueva era pudiera comenzar y yo recuperara y continuara esa idea. Por eso, el tejido que haré en una de las salas se llama “quipu semi yo”, como una forma de abrir otros ciclo que se relaciona con el de 1971”, relata Cecilia. También tiene un significado casi profético y coincidental con el nuevo siglo, con su regreso a Chile y la semilla de un nuevo tiempo germinal en nuestro país.

SEMI YA se inauguró el martes 14 de marzo de año 2000, a las 19:30 hrs. y permaneció abierta hasta el 12 de abril. La Galería Gabriela Mistral abrió su temporada 2000, dando a conocer el trabajo de Cecilia Vicuña, realizado en y para este espacio que se inscribe en la zona de vanguardia del arte contemporáneo. Este centro cerró el año 1999 con la destacada muestra “Trabajos Recientes”, del artista catalán Antoni Muntadas.

La exposición –arte y poesía, cantos y murmullos- fue el punto focal de un proyecto mayor de recolección y plantación de semillas nativas, que la artista realizó con el auspicio del Krannert Art Museum de la Universidad de Illinois. La intención fue que la experiencia poético-visual de la obra sea parte de un proceso mayor, del que es independiente e interdependiente a la vez.

La obra se llevó a cabo en realidades simultáneas. Una instalación específica reunió arte y poesía en torno a la experiencia de recolección de semillas. Otra realidad se efectuó en el espacio visual, con la creación de una obra en la red de Internet, un web site creado para esta obra por el Krannert Art Museum, lugar de encuentro en el que se formó un tejido de relaciones y conexiones entre científicos y artistas, botánicos, educadores y niños en Chile y Estados Unidos, dedicados a investigar y plantar semillas locales en vías de extinción.

La muestra en Santiago constó de dos espacios: una sala diurna concebida como un gabinete de estudio y contemplación de semillas. La sala contigua, pen-umbral, contuvo un tejido espacial de hilos finísimos entretejidos de semillas: el “quipu semi yo”. El tejido, hasta cierto punto recorrible y penetrable por el público, era frágil. “La obra ya comenzó hace muchos años, con la recolección de semillas. La muestra es la culminación de un proceso de años que continúa descomponiéndose y deshaciéndose. Es una obra viviente”, expresa la artista.

detail from Semiya (2000)

Canoa de Luz (2001)

Quotidiana

Site-specific installation
Castello di Rivoli, Italy

detail from Canoa de Luz (2001)

DIS SOLVING threads of water and light (2002)

Dis solving Threads of Water and Light

a site specific installation

César Paternosto/Cecilia Vicuña

Drawing Center, New York

The curator Catherine de Zegher asked us to collaborate on a piece. I proposed: “Dis solving, threads of water and light” based on the idea of K'isa, a complex view of color in use by Andean weavers. My reading of K'isa comes from Veronica Cereceda's work in the highlands of the north of Chile. A K'isa is a band of colors included in the textile field, where one color dissolves, to let the other be.

At the Drawing Center, our collaboration created an echo in space of this concept. On opening night, Cesar Paternosto’s drawings and watercolors, occupied the whole space of the exhibition, with only one of my threads on view. As days progressed, his works began to disappear, and my threads took over the space, leaving just one of his works on view.

Read the poem Dis solving into union

Click to download exhibition publication Drawing Papers 34

detail from DIS SOLVING threads of water and light (2002)

Casa del Nos (2003)

Centro Cultural Matucana 100, Santiago de Chile

Casa del Nos (The House of Ours) was created for the exhibition Promoción Popular.
In this installation the artist wove the space at Matucana 100, to commemorate the movement of the people of Santiago who supported the government of Salvador Allende, which at the time was under attack by the truckers strike. This space became the site for the distribution of food that sustained the whole of Santiago de Chile.

See the film Casa del Nos

Quipu Menstrual (2006)

Centro Cultural, Palacio de la Moneda, Chile

On election day, I climbed the El Plomo Glacier to place my vote in the mountain, asking Michelle Bachelet to remember the union of water and blood, not to sell the glaciers to the mining corporations.

Painted Ideas (2009)

AN EXHIBITION CELEBRATING THE VISUAL AND SPATIAL POETRY IN THE OXFORD BOOK OF LATIN AMERICAN POETRY

Cecilia de Torres Gallery, New York

PAINTED IDEAS, curated by Cecilia Vicuña, is an exhibition celebrating the visual poetry in the newly published Oxford Book of Latin American Poetry.

The exhibition takes its name after the work of Simón Rodríguez the poet philosopher of the 19th century. It presents pre-Columbian artifacts, drawings & books by Torres-García, Octavio Paz, Vicente Huidobro, Xul Solar, Eielson, Amereida, Guaman Poma, Maya logogliphs, and khipus, photographs & reproductions, and a site specific work by Cecilia Vicuña,

The exhibition celebrates the publication of The Oxford Book of Latin American Poetry, edited by Cecilia Vicuña and Ernesto Livon-Grosman, Oxford University Press, New York, 2009.

This compilation is a milestone anthology that covers more than 500 years’ production of Latin American poetry by more than 120 poets. The book includes texts by indigenous, Colonial, modernist and feminist poets, as well as 1960s’ liberation poetry, and experimental and oral expression.

For highlights of the exhibition click here.

Links to Painted Ideas

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGCqEjVqUGE

http://www.amazon.com/Oxford-Book-Latin-American-Poetry/dp/0195124545

detail from Painted Ideas (2009)

Quipu huérfano (2009)

detail from the exhibition Painted Ideas

detail from Painted Ideas (2009)

Water Weaving (2011-12)

October 2011 – January 2012
The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA
"Dance/Draw" exhibition organized by Helen Molesworth

"...above the stepped down chute to the water is a sculpture that Cecilia Vicuña calls “Water Weaving,” a white textile “drawing” that drapes over the computer monitors like a canopy and matches the undulations of the waves below. If it feels like dancing to be there, it’s not because you’re entering “an unwitting stage.” It’s because you’re breathing again."
-- Debra Cash

"Dance/Draw" explores the development of the line in contemporary art from 1960s to the present, tracing the journey of the line through the transformation of drawing in the 1960s, to its explosion off the page and into three dimensional space; ultimately finding itself in the realm of dance.

For this exhibition Helen Molesworth commissioned Cecilia Vicuña to create a site specific installation for the Poss Family Mediateque at the ICA Boston, within the “The Line in Space” section, dedicated to works that extend the concept of the line into three dimensions. Many of these works use thread, string, or wire as a literal manifestation of the line. Ruth Asawa crochets wire to make bulbous hanging sculptures that evoke the human form; Liz Collins uses knitting machines to create performance-based installations. Eva Hesse covers string in papier-mâché, extends it off the canvas and attaches it to an adjoining wall; and Faith Wilding crochets fiber to create a room. In the Poss Family Mediatheque overlooking Boston Harbor, Cecilia Vicuña suspends a web of woven thread from the ceiling while monitors below display imagery of bodies of water familiar to the artist. Typically, art history has discussed these works in relation to “women’s work” and “craft” due to their use of traditional modes of needlework and because the artists were women. Dance/Draw suggests instead that we see the use of fiber and wire, as well as traditional techniques like knitting and crocheting, in relation to historical concerns with line.

detail from Water Weaving (2011-12)

Semiya / Frø Quipu (2015)

Site-specific installation for DUMP!

"COLLECTIVE MAKING series at Kunsthal Aarhus presents a new exhibition curated by Elaine Gan, Steven Lam and Sarah Lookofsky.

DUMP! gathers together artists, scientists and organisms to explore multispecies collaboration that reshapes the ruins of modernity and resists industrialized progress. Contesting the celebratory logics of invention and making that dominate contemporary discourse, DUMP! creates an arena for waste, obsolescence, and decomposition, where practices of nurturing and collective cultivation may begin, turning composts to compositions."

Elaine Gan, Steven Lam and Sarah Lookofsky.

Click to download exhibition catalogue
[in Danish, from the 2015 reconstruction of the 2000 exhibition]

About to Happen

About to Happen traces the artist’s long career to stage a conversation about discarded and displaced people, places, and things in a time of global climate change.

The first major U.S. solo exhibition of Vicuña’s multidisciplinary work in performance, sculpture, drawing, video, text, and site-specific installations over the course of the past 40 years. Reframing dematerialization as both a formal consequence of 1960s conceptualism and radical climate change—the exhibition examines a process that shapes public memory and responsibility. Operating fluidly between concept and craft, text and textile, Vicuña’s practice weaves together disparate disciplines as well as communities—with shared relationships to land and sea, and to the economic and environmental disparities of the 21st century.

Cecilia Vicuña: About to Happen is organized by the Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans (CAC), and co-curated by Andrea Andersson, The Helis Foundation Chief Curator of Visual Arts at the CAC, and Julia Bryan-Wilson, Associate Professor, University of California, Berkeley.

Cecilia Vicuña: About to Happen, a full-color publication by the same name, co-imprinted by Siglio Press and the CAC will be released in March 2017.

Additional resources:

An Un-Memorial to All That Has Been Lost by John Pluecker

Pueblo de altares

detail from About to Happen, 1990 (2017)

Pueblo de altares

Colliguay

detail from About to Happen, 2000 (2017)

Wool Satellite

detail from About to Happen, 1990's (2017)

Balsa Snake Raft to Escape the Flood

detail from About to Happen (2017)

Noche de las especies

detail from About to Happen, 2009 (2017)

Drawings by Cecilia Vicuña, digital animation by Robert Kolodny

Noche de las especies

detail from About to Happen, 009 (2017)

Quipu New Orleans

detail from About to Happen (2017)

Quipu Womb, The story of the red thread, 2017

EMST, National Museum of Contemporary Art, documenta 14, Athens

Mixed media, (wool, rope, cane sticks) Aprox. (6m H x 8m W)

Site specific installation.

This monumental, immersive poem in space exemplarily weds Cecilia Vicuña’s material instincts as a visual artist with the visceral lyricism of her writing. A “quipoem”, then, paying homage to the ancient, pre-Columbian art of the quipu—a species of writing involving intricate knotting patterns. This particular quipu consists of giant strands of untreated wool, sourced from a local Greek provider, and dyed a startling crimson red in honor of a syncretic religious tradition that—via the umbilical cord of menstrual symbolism—connects Andean mother goddesses with the maritime mythologies of ancient Greece.

Dieter Roesltraete

Additional resources:

documenta 14

Read Thread - The Story of the Red Thread

Beach Ritual (near Athens) documenta 14, 2017

Kape Beach Legraina on the way to Sounioun, April 10.

In this performance people come together to weave a connection between their bodies and the sea, creating a living net in hommage to the ancient sea cultures of the Mediterranean, and to mourn those who die at sea

Beach Ritual (near Athens) documenta 14, 2017

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CV Kassel Quipu Gut, photo Jane England.jpg

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Vicuña perfo kassel jun 8 photo by Jane England.JPG