The politically engaged works of the Chilean artist and poet Cecília Vicuña’s (*1948, Chile) are tapestries of personal, national and ecological references. Weaving together different thematic threads is at the core of many of Vicuña’s performative actions. Deeply influenced by the indigenous people of the Andes, she frequently works with threads, textiles and texts. These are also symbols of female work and domesticity – another key subject addressed in Vicuña’s art. In 1966, before graduating from the Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes de Chile, she began creating sculptural-performative interventions in a format suggestively called “precarious” (precarious works). A precarious work is an assemblage of found materials – wood sticks, leaves, stones, feathers, threads, shells, plastic and bones – which she arranges and displays in the landscape. As the name suggests, these works rapidly deteriorate and are reabsorbed by the environment. In 1972-73 (1973 being the year when the Popular Unity coalition of President Salvador Allende was overthrown by General Pinochet’s military coup), Vicuña exhibited 400 precarious works as an act of political and cultural resistance: “Politically, they stand for socialism, magically they help the liberation struggle, and aesthetically they are as beautiful as they can be to comfort the soul and give strength.”

artist's website: www.ceciliavicuna.com

Performed for the first time in Santiago in 1966, El Guante (The Glove) was re-enacted by the artist in New York in 2011. While walking the streets and taking a bus, Cecília Vicuña plays with her hands, with coloured threads, and with the people she encounters. In a poem with the same title from 1966, she says: “During a bus ride I would raise a hand gloved in a glove ‘begloved’. The glove is not a glove, but a primordial mythic being. (The bus too, moves in primordial mythic time.) When a girl is born, her mother puts a spider in her hand, to teach her how to weave. Thread is the memory of the journey unravelling.”

Courtesy Cecilia Vicuña