A Vast Poetics of Spontaneity: Cecilia Vicuña’s South American Retrospective Soñar el Agua

Cecilia Vicuña conducting her opening ritual at the MALBA opening in Buenos Aires. Photos by Alejandro Guyot, courtesy of MALBA.

By SONNET PHELPS August 27, 2024

On opening day of her retrospective at the MALBA in Buenos Aires, Cecilia Vicuña wrapped her attendees in great swaths of unspun wool. Linked shoulder-to-shoulder by the fibrous lengths of material, she guided a procession out of the museum and toward the edge of the Río de la Plata. Hand-over-hand they placed the wool into the river, consciously integrating the stuff of her exhibition with the water to which the surrounding city owes its life. 

For the 76-year-old Chilean poet and artist, this ritual act was a basic step in installing her work. Although she works across a kaleidoscopic range of mediums—including painting, sculpture, vocals, performance, and film—the core of her practice is poetic. And her fundamental poetics is responsive, not intrusive: participating in what’s already here, in this particular location, in this present moment. Scrawled directly on the gallery wall in red crayon at the MALBA, I spotted perhaps the simplest articulation of this poetics, in which “the poem” can be understood as “the moment” of her art (translation my own): 

el poema no está en el habla

ni en la tierra, ni en el papel

sino en el cruce y la unión

de los tres

en un lugar que no es.

the poem is not in speech

nor in the earth, nor on paper

but rather in the crossing and the union

of the three

in a place that is not.

Entry view of Soñar el Agua at the MALBA in Buenos Aires. Photo by Santiago Orti, courtesy of MALBA. 

Soñar el Agua: una retrospectiva del futuro / Dreaming Water: a retrospective of the future is the most complete retrospective of Vicuña’s work to date and the first to be exhibited entirely in South America. Shown exclusively in Santiago, Buenos Aires, and São Paulo, it traces the evolution of a career—in over 200 separate pieces, from early self portraits in marker on creased cardstock to her imposing, multi-story quipus—that for nearly sixty years has been laying a blueprint for how to reckon simultaneously with growing social, ecological, and political pressures. 

The title inverts the traditional frame of a retrospective, resisting a Western logic of linear progress and asserting the necessity of Vicuña’s vision for thinking and inhabiting the future. Art historian and secretary of her archival foundation Dr. José de Nordenflycht described the intentional circularity of her “futuristic” sense of “the new… as an invocation toward the ancestral.” In Andean cosmology, he pointed out, time is represented with the past laid out in front and the unknowable future at one’s back, immersed in the continually arising present. 

Vicuña's painting "Bendígame Mamita" (1977), oil on canvas, 55 x 47 inches. Photo courtesy of MALBA.

The exhibition marks a vital moment of homecoming for Vicuña. Born and raised in Santiago, Vicuña went into voluntary exile following Chile’s military coup in 1973 and has lived primarily outside the country ever since; for the last forty years, in a studio alongside the Hudson river in New York City. Although she has maintained a close connection to Chile, national recognition for her art was limited until she won the country’s Premio Nacional de Artes Plásticas in 2023. Most of her recent acclaim has been in North America and Europe, with highlights including Documenta14 in Kassel and Athens in 2017 and the 56th Venice Biennale in 2022. 

Soñar el Agua first opened in May 2023 at the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in Santiago, a site layered with memory and significance for the artist. Fifty-two years earlier, a twenty-three-year-old Vicuña gave the first solo show of her career in the same building: Salón de Otoño (Autumn Room), in which she filled a downstairs gallery with dried leaves collected from the surrounding Parque Forestal. 

Beyond its significance for her own life, the location is connected to the ancient Andean world that for Vicuña has long been a key source of insight. The museum sits alongside the Río Mapocho, Santiago’s central waterway; recent archaeological and historical evidence has demonstrated that the Inca Road—in Quechua, the Qhapaq Ñan—also ran along this river, bisecting the city. “I was born on the Camino Inca,” Cecilia told me, “on the northern edge of the Mapocho.” 

Left: Cecilia Vicuña posing with the gallery at the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes where she held "Salón de Otoño" in 1971. Photo by Sonnet Phelps. Right: Installation view of an Andean quipu at the MALBA, on loan for Vicuña's exhibition from the Chilean Museum of Precolumbian Art. Photo by Santiago Orti, courtesy of MALBA

One of the key forms Vicuña has multiply inhabited and reimagined throughout her career is the quipu, which derives from an ancient Andean recording practice using systems of knotted string. The exhibition’s centerpiece is Vicuña’s famous Quipu Menstrual (La sangre de los glaciares): long strands of unspun wool dyed different colors of red. Originally concieved in 2006 to protest a mining project threatening glaciers in Chile’s cordillera, the piece is adapted to fit—and participate in—each space it inhabits.

At the Bellas Artes, the quipu hung from the center of the museum, the neoclassical French cupola bleeding menstrual blood in what the exhibition’s curator Miguel López described to me as a radical “feminization of the building.” Standing in the baroque hall, Vicuña commented to me that the museum is a direct copy of a Parisian palace. But when she put the quipu here, she said, the building was new again, or maybe completely ancient. It was an act, she felt, of returning the space to its roots.

When I visited the exhibition at the MALBA in Buenos Aires last February, the Quipu Menstrual hung four stories high through the center of the boxy, modern building: great tongues of wool hanging from the ceiling, a waterfall pooling on the bottom floor in curling spirals, its presence tinting everything red. Riding the central escalator, I reached out my hand and almost—almost!—ran my fingers through the textured wool.

At the Pinacoteca in São Paulo, where I attended the inauguration in May, the exhibition was held in a sunken gallery beneath an airy courtyard. There wasn’t a large vertical space for the quipu to hang; instead, it was modeled as a single-story forest, blurring the quipu’s spatial metaphor between streams of water—or blood—and trees. At this more intimate scale, inviting guests to enter and weave through it, the wool cried out even louder to be touched. Watching Vicuña herself interact with the piece, it seemed that was exactly what she wanted us to do.

The other of the exhibition’s two major quipus, the Quipu Desaparecido, also conjures an open conversation with the space it inhabits and everything that lies beyond it. At the center of a curtain-darkened room is another waterfall of wool, this one off-white, with moving imagery projected onto it: the head of an Andean condor, patterns evoking traditional textiles. The room is filled with sound: breath sucked in and out, a voice exploding and dissolving, fading into song. 

At one level, this piece is a direct allusion to the violent civic-military dictatorships of the twentieth century in Latin America, a context in which the world “desaparecido” refers to an individual forcibly “disappeared” by military intelligence. In Chile, the work was installed in the year that marked half a century since the 1973 coup; for Santiaguinos carrying the suffering of loved ones lost during the dictatorship, the Quipu Desaparecido created a space of solace and reflection.

Installation views of Quipu Menstrual at the MALBA in Buenos Aires and at the Pinacoteca in São Paulo. Photos by Santiago Orti (right), courtesy of MALBA, and Levi Fanan (left), courtesy of Pinacoteca de São Paulo."

The space carries a charge in Brazil and Argentina, too, where people are grappling with their own memory of violent dictatorships and facing political struggles that continue to threaten rights and lives. In Buenos Aires, the dates of the exhibition coincided with what for many Argentines was a politically painful presidential election. López, the curator, recalled feeling an “energy of disobedience and dissent” inhabit the show at the MALBA and “transform from it from inside.” In Brazil, the piece resonates in particular with the rapid deforestation of the Amazon rainforest. 

Beyond the specific historical-political contingencies it inflects in each site, the Quipu Desaparecido gestures more broadly to the five hundred years of colonial violence that have suppressed Indigenous ways of knowing across the South American continent. It offers a sacred space to honor the many kinds of forced disappearance and erasure—ongoing war and genocide, species extinction and habitat degradation—that these entangled legacies have led us toward. 

 Vicuña's Pueblo de Altares collects over a hundred of her delicate "Precario" sculptures: visual poems made from the ambient material of beach flotsam. Photo by Alejandro Guyot, courtesy of MALBA.

The large scale of Vicuña’s quipus makes obvious the way her works and the contexts in which they’re experienced mutually interpellate one another, but her poetics of spontaneity, ephemerality—and, necessarily, disappearance—is apparent throughout the paintings, films, sculptures, and texts that compose Soñar el Agua. Her work, as the title of her 2017 book Cecilia Vicuña: About to Happen alludes, is always a happening that transforms viewers into participants. It brings us into contact with what scholar Juliet Lynd has called “the rich interior of the ambient.”

Shown for the first time at this scale in South America, the porous and flexible body of Vicuña’s work offers a space of solidarity and reconnection that, despite vast cultural differences, convenes inhabitants of the Southern Cone in their shared memory, ancestry, and future.  

The day of the public opening at the Pinacoteca, I stood near the Quipu Menstrual, waiting for something to happen. Hearing laughter, I spotted Vicuña’s tiny figure weaving among the red and reddish tongues of wool, playing hide and seek with a pair of children attending the exhibition. I pulled out my phone to take a photo, but by the time I had the camera ready, Cecilia and the children had disappeared. WM