Cecilia Vicuña
Soñar el Agua
8 December 2023—26 February 2024
MALBA, Buenos Aires, Argentina
Soñar el agua, una retrospective of the future (1964-...) is the most complete exhibition dedicated to date to the poet, visual artist and feminist activist Cecilia Vicuña (Santiago of Chile, 1948). It offers a reading of Vicuña's work from South America and reviews sixty years of her production, highlighting her links with her native country, Argentina, the Andes mountain range, pre-Columbian textile memory, feminist struggles and eroticism, as well as the demands for self-determination of indigenous communities.
The exhibition brings together nearly 200 works, including paintings, drawings, texts, silkscreens, collages, textiles, videos, photographs, installations, book-objects, documents and sound performances carried out in different places in America and Europe. Dreaming the water updates Vicuña's commitment to popular struggles, respect for human rights and the importance of opposing devastation in a broad sense.
In the words of curator Miguel A. López: “Vicuña's poetics embraces everything and nothing at the same time, contaminates languages, ignores hierarchies and expresses with seismic force. It can take the form of poetry, painting, sculpture, collage, drawing or textile art, but also oral improvisations, television programs, interviews, seed and tree cultivation, cinema, performances, comics, theater sets, chalk murals, street graffiti , educational workshops, protest actions, flyers and manifestos. The underground engine that drives all these creative explosions is a desire to change the material and historical conditions of our existence.”
The name of the exhibition represents an invitation to change our relationship with the earth. “Without humidity there is no humanity,” the artist reminds us. Her creations are not only testimonies of the past but above all witnesses of an open future, just as this retrospective presents her work as an experience that is not definitive, but alive and in process.
In this sense, in the double height above the room on level -1 of the museum, the installation for a specific site is presented Menstrual quipu (The blood of the glaciers)Menstrual quipu (The blood of the glaciers), originally conceived by Vicuña in 2006 as a way to express his support for Michelle Bachelet, the first female president of Chile.