Threading together politics and poetics in Cecilia Vicuña’s fiber art

Authors

Jacqueline WitkowskiFollow

Date of this Version

2018

Citation

Published in The Social Fabric: Deep Local to Pan Global; Proceedings of the Textile Society of America 16th Biennial Symposium. Presented at Vancouver, BC, Canada; September 19 – 23, 2018. https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/tsaconf/

doi 10.32873/unl.dc.tsasp.0016

Comments

Copyright © 2018 by the author.

This paper has been developed and published in the Journal of Textile Design Research & Practice, in a special issue titled: The Textile Society of America. The Social Fabric: Deep Local to Pan Global. Selected Papers, Volume 7, Issue 1, 2019.

Link to the special issue: https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/rftd20/7/1?nav=tocList

To the article directly: https://doi.org/10.1080/20511787.2019.1575082

Abstract

In 2006, Chilean artist Cecelia Vicuña carried thick knotted red strands of unspun wool to Cerro El Plomo, a glaciated peak outside of Santiago. Done in response to government-sanctioned acquisitions of gold and silver mines sitting under the glacier by a Canadian corporation, Vicuña’s use of her quipu-an ancient mnemonic device-tied the historical disappearance of the Incan empire to an ecological devastation occurring in the new millennium. Her actions also referenced the Pinochet dictatorship, as well as her own exile when in 1979, she traveled to Colombia and with a red string tied to a glass of milk, spilled its contents in front of the historical home of the 19^th-century revolutionary leader Simon Bolivar. This pointed to the disappearance of the Allende government who promised a free milk distribution program in Chile and referenced the nearly 2,000 children who died from tainted milk in Bogata that same year. The connection between these two projects and much of Vicuña’s work is the reliance on the thread-it is critical of the military apparatus in tandem to recognizing those voices lost during colonization. I argue for an analysis of the textual layers existing within Vicuña’s fibre art, from the seemingly banal strands used in her installations and performances to their integration into her lines of poetry featuring the indigenous language of Mapudungun from the Mapuche people. In examining how these constructed fibres enter into everyday language and metaphorically address issues around identity, my paper analyzes the discourse centred on disappearance and its ties to artistic production occurring in Vicuña’s cross-cultural practice.