Cecilia Vicuña Selected video works

The exhibition opens with What is Poetry to You? (1980)—the first film made upon her return to South America, following Pinochet’s 1973 coup that forced her into exile while studying at Slade School of Fine Art in London. The film was shot in the streets of Bogotá, Colombia, where she was living—closer to her homeland yet still unable to return. Engaging with diverse group of subjects—from children to sex workers and street performers to scientists, Vicuña asks each what poetry means to them. Valuing each perspective, Vicuña’s video, like her own writing, suggests that poetry exists as a capacious category that can amplify a wide range of voices.

Characterised by Vicuña as a visual and sound poem, Paracas (1983) is another early work in which she experiments with the genre of stop-motion animation and sound—exemplifying the artist's innovative approach to filmmaking. Drawing inspiration from a 2000-year-old textile, forcibly taken from the Paracas Peninsula in Peru and now in the collection of the Brooklyn Museum, the work imagines the makers of the textile and the stories of their lives. In the work, Vicuña animates 30 characters out of the 90 three-dimensional woven creatures featured in the textile.

Quipu Mapocho (2017) and Quipu Womb (2024) are more recent films related to her solo and participatory projects respectively, that combine poetry, sound, and documentary footage from previous performances / actions. In Quipu Mapocho, Vicuña visits Chile’s Mapocho River, which the artist has described as a “river of death.” She notes that while the river has been heavily polluted with sewage and chemical waste, it was also a site where the Chilean dictatorship dumped bodies of individuals they had killed and tortured. Constructing quipus along the river, Vicuña creates weavings and knots with unspun wool in an effort to bring healing to this site of immense ecological and political violence and to recover the landscape’s status as a sacred place in indigenous history and culture.

Quipu Womb (2024) brings together unseen footage shot in Athens, Greece during Vicuña’s participation in Documenta 14, where she created the landmark monumental sculpture Quipu Womb (The Story of the Red Thread Athens) (2017) and performed a series of public and private rituals throughout the landscape. Combining poetry, performance, sound, and the artist’s engagement with the natural and built environments, Vicuña’s film tells the story of the origin of Quipu Womb which is intimately linked to the story of the “red thread,” the story of women. The film reflects the parallels between two original sources of mythology, Crete and the Andes, as she presented in Athens. Vicuña’s ritual offerings intend to restore the world’s wounded memory as a way of “turning around the waves of the system” currently leading us towards extermination.”

Vicuña’s wide-ranging film oeuvre is characterised by collaboration and by non-linear, episodic, and intuitive compositions—yet shaped by deep precision and decades of experience across a wealth of media. Colour, sound, and dissonance are vital elements: Vicuña listens closely to the natural world, while also generating sound through ancestral techniques such as chanting, using it as a tool for both expression and healing.

* The film poem Death of the Pollinators (2021), showing in Europe for the first time, is also on view in the gallery as part of Arch Future.