Cecilia Vicuna

Since the 1960s, Chilean poet, visual artist and activist Cecilia Vicuña (born 1948) has brought a radical perspective to the relationship between art and politics through her writing and artistic creations. Vicuña’s work is varied and multidisciplinary, constructed through words, images, environments and a combination of languages, mediums and techniques.

This volume gathers texts by the curator Miguel A. López, Lucy R. Lippard, Valerie Fraser and Cecilia Vicuña herself, along with a selection of photographs and representative pieces, some published here for the first time. This selection shows Vicuña’s constant commitment to themes of eroticism, colonial legacies, liberation struggles, feminism, collective joy, indigenous thought and environmental destruction.

Beginning and ending at the edge of the ocean at the sacred mouth of the Aconcagua River, About to Happen serves as a lament as well as love letter to the sea. In this artist's book, Chilean-born artist and poet Cecilia Vicuña weaves personal and ancestral memory while summoning the collective power to confront the economic disparities and environmental crises of the 21st century.

Collecting the detritus that washes up on shore, Vicuña assembles out of the refuse tiny precarios and basuritas—little sculptures held together with nothing more than string and wire, which she sometimes makes as offerings to be reclaimed by the sea.

About to Happen traces a decades-long practice that has refused categorical distinctions and thrived within the confluences of conceptual art, land art, feminist art, performance and poetry. Vicuña's nuanced visual poetics—operating fluidly between concept and craft, text and textile—transforms the discarded into the elemental, paying acute attention to the displaced, the marginalized and the forgotten.

This is the first overview of artist, poet and activist Cecilia Vicuña's (born 1948) prolific and influential career. Based in New York and Santiago, Vicuña has created a multidisciplinary ouevre inspired by feminist politics and indigenous art practices.

Seehearing the Enlightened Failure reproduces over 120 artworks by Vicuña from the 1960s to the present, ranging from vibrant figurative paintings to text-based drawings and "precarious" sculptures made of biodegradable materials.

It also features documentation of Vicuña's performances and installations, including her acclaimed quipu series in which she drapes large swaths of knotted raw wool from the ceilings of exhibition spaces as an homage to the Inca record-keeping practice.

In this brilliant intergenerational dialogue curator Camila Marambio and Cecilia Vicuña, one of the most intriguing Indoamerican artists of our times, converse about mestizaje/miscenegation, ecological disaster, eroticism and decolonization in their multilingual, subversive and irreverent humorous slang. The result is a unique book that presents a conversation that is both poetic and critical. The particular dialogue presented in the book crosses over from Spanish to English, from poetry to academic argumentation, and from art to science. It proposes a necessary method for decolonial liberation, which reveals the transformative power of art in search of “an ecology of the soul, the resplendence of our connectivity to each other and the cosmos.”

Beginning and ending at the edge of the ocean, Chilean­born artist and poet Cecilia Vicuña's (born 1948) artist's book serves as both a lament and love letter to the sea. Vicuña collects the detritus that washes up on shore and assembles out of the refuse tiny precarios and basuritas—little sculptures held together with nothing more than string and wire.
About to Happen, which accompanies an exhibition at the Contemporary Arts Center New Orleans, traces a decades-long practice that has refused categorical distinctions and thrived within the confluences of conceptual art, land art, feminist art, performance and poetry. In an era of increasing climate change and economic disparity, Vicuña’s nuanced visual poetics—operating fluidly between concept and craft, text and textile—transforms the discarded into the elemental, paying acute attention to the displaced, the marginalized and the forgotten.