From an early age, Vicuña “wove the understanding that what I was sensing was different from what other people believe.” Her work often begins life as a poem and unfolds in various forms, a site-specific installation, performance, ritual, song, or film. Instinctively, Vicuña has always privileged indigenous knowledge, and the counternarratives that emerge from information exchanges between the body and the earth, plants, animals, insects, “bacteria, cells,” and “everything.” Over the past fifty years, Vicuña has produced an extraordinary multidisciplinary archive of work, publishing over twenty books, including Cloud-net in 2000 (Art in General), Spit Temple: The Selected Performances of Cecilia Vicuña in 2012 (Ugly Duckling Presse), Kuntur Ko in 2015 (Tornsound), and Selected Poems in 2017 (Kelsey Street Press). She has exhibited her work at the Museo National de Bella Artes in Santiago, The Institute of Contemporary Art in London, The Whitney Museum of American Art and the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York. Vicuña’s quipu, an ancient form of writing and record-keeping used by the Incas and other Andean cultures, and precarios, small sculptures, or “multidimensional poems” made of found and collected materials have appeared at museums and galleries around the world. Yet, it is only in the past few years, with a growing acceptance of the climate crisis and the re-centering of feminist and indigenous voices, that her work has garnered the mainstream recognition and appreciation it has long deserved. Most recently, the Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art in Rotterdam held Vicuña’s first major retrospective, and Vicuña was awarded both the 2019 Herb Alpert Prize and Spain’s most prestigious award, the 2019 Premio Velázquez de Artes Plásticas. When I visited her at the apartment that has long been her base in New York City, Vicuña was keen to focus on the protests and police brutality in her homeland, human responsibility for ecological destruction, and her recently published multilingual book-length conversation with Camila Marambio, Slow Down Fast, A Toda Raja. Additionally, we spoke about the art of listening, translation, spiritual houses, and how sidewalk forests are grown. And I was reminded that many of the ideas widely considered neoteric are ancient seeds Cecilia Vicuña has sown.
—Sarah Timmer Harvey
I feel so honored to be here with you, to be welcomed into your home. So many of your interventions and poems are concerned with bringing the natural world into human-made structures, and I’m interested in learning about the items that you choose to surround yourself with, the things you bring into your personal space.
First of all, here, you see a lot of books and lots of rocks and crystals. I used to have a lot of very big plants, and I still have a few plants. To have a little forest inside is very important to me. I grew up in the countryside, so it’s like I never left that relationship with the land.
I find that when you’ve grown up in proximity to nature and lived in a wild landscape, it’s difficult at times to reconcile that with being in a cityscape like New York.
Half a block away from here is the [Hudson] river. Now you cannot see it because New York City is so corrupt that they’ve allowed the construction of a skyscraper in the middle of the street, which blocks the view, but I used to be able to see the river from my window. When I first moved in, this was an abandoned neighborhood; most of the streets didn’t really have street lights, and there was a lot of wilderness on the sidewalks. I called my first works in New York sidewalk forests because there were so many things growing between the cracks, and it was just these ruins and empty lots. The river was not accessible like it is now, you had to crawl underneath wire to touch the river, and I did! We would illegally sun ourselves, not on the rocks, but on huge pieces of cement!
Do you remember seeing a lot of wildlife in those years?
Absolutely, for example, Manhattan is in the path of the Monarch butterflies, and in the old days, in the spaces between my building and the river, in those empty lots, there were lots of wildflowers and of course, lots of butterflies. When the gentrifiers came and started to build many buildings, all of that disappeared, and the pesticides took the butterflies. Now when I see one or two butterflies per season, I dance with joy.
When I was at your recent retrospective at the Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art in Rotterdam, I noticed that you had reconstructed La ruca abstracta, which is a “spiritual house” for Salvador Allende, the former socialist President of Chile. I know that this particular piece was originally constructed in the seventies, and then decades later, you recreated La ruca abstracta in London, Chile, and now Rotterdam. I wondered if you could speak to this experience; what it means for you to rebuild that house for Allende?
That is a beautiful question and a very rare one, nobody asks such things. I think I started to build these little houses in the sixties, in Chile, in Concón. I built them with debris from the beach, and to me, it was like a city, like an ancient city or a city of the future for the sea to erase. I didn’t know at the time that this was an ancient practice of pre-Columbian America, and I think, also in China and Africa. It is something that has existed in human culture or various human cultures forever, but I started making them just because I wanted to. I was going to go to architecture school, and this was my vision of architecture. Time goes by, and when Allende was killed, I was in London and immediately built a small first version of the house. It was like the model because the idea of creating something very small is a sort of play on scale. When you can build something very tiny, you can do the same thing very large, or at different sizes, something happens with your relationship to space, time and beyond, the cosmos, and so forth. And I think it’s one of the core sensibilities of indigenous culture. For example, in Chile, when people die, on the road, you will see that every road has these tiny little houses. These are spirit houses for people who have died on the road.
I grew up seeing that, and I suppose this was my inspiration. When Allende was killed, when he was being bombarded, he grabbed the microphone and transmitted this speech about how Chile would be free after all. To me, those words were so full of beauty and truth and spirit. That house is the embodiment of those words. It has a central piece, which is the painting o Los ojos de Allende, because it seemed to me that we ought to see through the eyes that he had given us. That’s how I constructed it. You could see the house from the outside, and you could see the house from the inside.
Through Allende’s eyes. . .
That’s right, through his eyes and through being within the spirit house. That first little house had lots of plants, which were my own plants and many paintings and little objects. That house was very much derided and ridiculed by my friends, the other artists, my colleagues. Everybody thought it was complete rubbish, and it was all destroyed, including the original painting. Nobody was interested in saving it, I didn’t have money to transport it, and so it was left behind when the exhibition was finished, thrown into the garbage, who knows what happened to it. Fast forward, and to my surprise, in 2013, I was invited to exhibit in London. It was a group show about Latin American artists of the seventies in London. I had never been asked to reconstruct that house, but I wanted to do it because it had been destroyed. To this day, the spirit of Allende has not been fully integrated into the culture of Chile, Latin America, or the world. And I think the promise of the future is in that spirit that seeks for justice without any oppression, without any repression, without any force. A true participatory democracy. You know [Allende’s spirit] was something we experienced. Everything had room. It was so inclusive, so wild and chaotic. It was absolutely perfect. People criticized it for those same reasons, but for me, there was an explosion of infinite creativity that came from that spirit. And that is what I wanted to recreate.
Is each ritual building of Allende’s “spiritual house” the same for you, or has it evolved into something different over the years?
The difference is that each time I have recreated it, I feel more intensely the beauty and power of that vision. Because as time progresses, that vision seems more and more impossible to achieve. We are living in a period of brutal authoritarian disregard for people, disregard for everything that lives, we are killing everything. When I am building it, I am crying with joy that I am still able to do it and crying with sadness that this vision has all been forgotten, as though it never existed. But I have to tell you that in the uprising now in Chile, I have seen for the first time since he was killed, that his spirit is alive. Though he’s not mentioned in the rallies, the song that everybody sings is his song. That is the song of the people united. Chileans are not yet ready to speak of him, but they are ready to sing the song.
There have been several times throughout your career when you have offered a message that the world was perhaps not yet ready to hear. I have to think of your poems and performances about global warming in the 1990s, or when you approached Allende with your idea for a day of the seeds in the seventies, and he told you that Chile was not yet ready for such an initiative. Do you think that Chile is now ready?
I think so. It’s the most extraordinary turnaround. I truly thought I was going to die before I would see it, but it has already happened. It is also extraordinary that we have been talking about this painting that is called o Los ojos de Allende, the eyes of Allende. I don’t know if you have heard what is happening, that the government in Chile has been sending the police to shoot protestors in the eyes. There are hundreds and hundreds of kids, some of them as young as ten or twelve years old who have lost either one eye or both eyes because they have been shot at close range directly into the eyes. It's like the powers don’t want us seeing what they are doing to us and to the earth. What kind of training are these policemen going through to tell them that this is necessary? To shoot children, young students, and teenagers in this manner. What has happened to humanity that this is at all possible? And the government continues to declare that they are respecting human rights. There’s this fakeness, this pretense that their power is legitimate is a form of violence. It’s not that we haven’t encountered it historically, but now it’s more criminal than ever because so much is at stake. The survival of our species is at stake, no less than that.
To me, the meaning of these works of mine that have been derided and ridiculed for so long, it’s sort of like those sidewalk forests I was telling you about, something that sprouts and grows of its own accord—a sort of rebellion of the seeds, a rebellion of the poems themselves. The stories and visions have an agency of their own, and we participate in them. We participate in a sort of exchange, in an inter-exchange. I think this is a view that quantum physics now proves. That the observer and the observed are entwined, they are entangled in ways that we are not yet ready to understand, but for someone like me it's common sense because I have witnessed it all my life. In my poem, el poema es el animal hundiendo la boca En el manantial, I say: “the poem is the animal sinking its mouth in the stream,” and it’s not a metaphor, it's like it’s my mouth. The poem is an organ, an organism, a being. All those words don’t fit it because it’s something else. Language itself is something so powerful and unknown. That is the beauty of it. That’s why it cannot be controlled. However much they may try to control us through fake news. What is true eventually comes through like water seeping through and appears where it is not supposed to appear.
I would like to ask you more about the art of listening. I so admire your capacity to do this when there are so many people who seem unwilling to listen either to each other or to the earth. I read your conversation with Camila Marambio, which you have just published as a bilingual book titled “Slow Down Fast, A Toda Raja” and was fascinated by your experience of visiting the Guambiano people in Colombia in 1977. You went to teach them a workshop, but instead, you told Camila that they taught you how to listen.
What I remember of that moment is that I was supposed to be a guest teacher who they had invited there because some friends of mine were making a film there, and had told them about me. The tribe said: “Okay, if you have such a friend, why doesn’t she come and do some workshops here?” But I showed up, and no one was particularly interested in doing a workshop or doing any of the activities. Everyone seemed to follow a rhythm, a sort of way of being, and that way of being was so beautiful. Usually when you arrive at a group of people, a family, for example, it’s always very noisy; children are crying, people are discussing the children or giving them orders. All of the familiar sounds of a big gathering of people were not there. All the sounds that came out of this gathering—and there were a lot of people; the sounds were of a different order. The order was more or less the way the sounds are when you are walking through the forest. There is a sort of composition: [Cecilia whispers, voice rustling like leaves] that kind of thing and there was a music to it. That music depended on everybody sensing the other. Therefore, nobody spoke louder, and nobody raised their voice. I was there ten days, and I never heard children going through a tantrum, shouting, or fighting each other. Everything was done with a quality of softness, a sort of delicate exchange which spelled respect and dignity to me. This is what I understood to be collective listening.
Through listening and observation, you came to “know” and understand extraordinary things about the world as a very young child, and have spoken of it as receiving a kind of “transmission.” Can you tell me more about this?
Lewis Carroll once said if children were left unsupervised, they could evolve their imaginations and sensitivity. That’s exactly how I grew up. I grew up in the countryside where nobody at the time thought that children should be supervised. So, my mother would say to me: “Bye my darling, I’ll be back in a few minutes,” and she would return at the end of the day. Where we were, the countryside was like a wilderness. There was cultivated land, but there were forests, irrigation canals, and there were no fences between one place and the next, so there was a sense of openness. And there I was, wandering around, always alone and in silence. In that universe of silence, everything is alive, and everything speaks with the child. That’s what I experienced. I remember playing, for example, in the irrigation canal which was just like a ditch, but a deep ditch. That was my favorite place, and the water ran very strongly because it ran vertically from the mountains into the sea. There was all this water that was moving, playing with light and shadow. I think it's true that these were languages. They were speaking, and I was part of it, part of those sounds. That is the source of my art and my poetry. I learned to relate to my perception of serving what I perceived. I remember very well the day when I realized there was something called a dream. Because I was intensely in reality and starting to wake up. I am in my bedroom and realizing: “What is this? There is more than one reality.” And I could go into the garden and know that in the garden there were several worlds. How did I know? Because it was there.
There were also a large number of books kept by your family, and it was in one of these books that you first encountered the quipu.
Yes, one of my aunts had a passion for pre-Columbian art. She was on the Vicuña side of the family, so she was not indigenous, but she venerated pre-Columbian art. She had some textiles on the wall, and nobody told me these were pre-Columbian textiles, but I realized that when I was a grown-up. And yes, her books, in her art book collection she had these art books that were all imported from Europe, everybody had those, but she also had this collection of pre-Columbian art books, and I was fascinated by them because they were very different from everything else. Even as a child, I could recognize how different this art was from European art, the structure, the shapes. I suppose I don’t have a particular memory of first seeing the quipu, but a book is the only possibility because nobody discussed or mentioned quipu, and at the time they were not on view. My impression is that I saw these quipu, learned that they were a form of record-keeping and that they had been taken away from us. Once I was home, and I still have those notes, I wrote this image of the quipu that remembers nothing. I made a quipu later as a desire, as a memory.
You have since made many quipu and exhibited them all over the world. When you are creating these quipu, or writing “quipoems” for specific sites outside of Chile, or the Andean region, do you view this as an act of translation?
Absolutely, because the quipu were banished by the conquistadors. Once they realized that the registry of ownership and responsibility for the land was in the quipu, that’s when they killed it. They banned them and prohibited any having of quipu and quipu-making. This was only done one hundred years after they had already been in Peru, so it took them a while to realize how powerful, important, and embedded in the culture, the knowledge, or knowing the quipu was. I began making quipus in the late sixties, but my quipus were unlike any known quipu. The first one was just an idea, a virtual quipu, then I wove them in space. But only when I constructed my first public, monumental quipu in the year 2000, I got what the quipu actually was. I had done big space weavings before that, but I did not call them quipu. I was already creating them, but not calling them quipu.
Can you tell me why?
Because I didn’t follow the right configuration. They followed a sort of fractal geometry but a different kind of fractal geometry. If I show you an example, you will see it right away. But I have seen that art historians were writing about my work, naturally calling them quipus, and I think they were right because I couldn’t have had that sense of space without the quipu. The first site-specific quipu that I did was in Santiago in the year 2000. It was in an exhibition called Semiya, and I called the quipu Semiyo because we were not yet ready to relate to the seed, just as we were not yet ready to relate to the quipu. So, I made this quipu almost invisible. It was a white gallery, white ceiling, white floors, white walls, and I put a very faint white thread, and from this white thread hung the tiniest of seeds, so people could come in the gallery and think: an empty room! That is what I wanted the quipu to inhabit, that in-between space between what is readable, what is not readable, what is translatable, what is translated, and what cannot yet be translated. And it is a translation in the sense of what the indigenous people of the Andes saw in the quipu. They saw a connectivity between their bodies and the world, the connectivity between their body and the cosmos, the illustration of the stars, all these things. They had three kinds of quipu: the tactile quipu that was the direct quipu, but they had also an invisible quipu, and this was a system of responsibilities and care for the land and the water all the way between Cusco and the end of the known universe to them in Chile. And then they had a third quipu which was the ritual quipu, and they had these ceremonies which had hundreds of people collectively involved in a sort of weaving performance of which almost nothing is known. I know that this must have existed because I have read a paragraph this big [makes gesture to show that it was a short paragraph] in a book by a chronicler. And from that paragraph, I have deduced a universe. I am translating the history of the quipu that is not yet acknowledged. I translate it with my body, involving people to create collective quipus, ritual quipus. I do this in landscapes, and I do them in museums, I do them in the street, anywhere I can. I think of them as a metaphor for collectiveness, for unity, for sensing what is around you. It is truly a campaign that defends the human relationship to the land because if we don’t enter a different relationship with the land we will surely disappear. The land will not support us anymore, because we are destroying it. These acts that were once derided now again have meaning for people. How did this happen? I don’t know. Everybody knows we are threatened as a species now.
Do you think our species deserves to continue?
Not really. But we could deserve it if we change our ways. Because if we continue on this path, the earth definitely has to get rid of us. There’s no other choice. It is the Christian paradigm that the earth was created for our use. That ain’t the earth’s idea. That isn’t the purpose of evolution. The purpose of evolution is to evolve. It’s not part of our mission to control or to change nature to suit our needs in such violent ways as we do now. We are making the ocean a plastic ocean. To me, we are in a period of distortion, distortion of all relationships.
On the topic of distortion, I must admit I was a little confused by the title of your retrospective in Rotterdam, Seehearing the Enlightened Failure. I read about it and researched extensively, but I am still not sure I understand it entirely.
I am very happy to be asked because I meant this title as a conundrum, as a riddle purposefully. Because it is a riddle that neither I nor anyone else understands exactly, and that’s why it matters. Years ago I created this verb: veroir. It is composed of two words and is, as Lewis Carroll wrote, a portmanteau.
[Here Sarah asks Cecilia if she could write it down. She takes a pencil and writes the following: Ver = to see, Oir = to hear]
Veroir, to me, is when you see hearing, and the hearing sees itself. It’s like an equation that turns to observe itself. And when I saw it, I thought that this is the word we need to leap into a new consciousness and perception of us, of what it is to be human. I think the key to every discussion that’s happening now is that we have refused every definition of what it is to be human. To be human is not to be a person; to be human is to be united. Because, essentially we are all completely connected through breath, through shit, through food, you see? We are pure connection. Why is veroir important? Are we really looking at ourselves? Where is the enlightenment when it comes to veroir? We need to re-enlighten ourselves by “seehearing” our own failures. How we have failed to preserve the earth, to preserve the food sources, to preserve the beasts and the fish. Our culture appears to be a success, but it is a success that hides our profound failure.
