After four decades based in New York, the Chilean artist Cecilia Vicuña achieves a milestone this Friday by exhibiting for the first time solo her creations around indigenous wisdom, ecology and the feminism in a city museum, the Guggenheim: “History is taking a leap if beings like me can be here & quot;, she tells Efe.
Vicuña, 74, who was recently awarded the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the Venice Biennale, opens an exhibition called “Spin Spin Triangulene”; which occupies three floors in the “rotunda” The Guggenheim, the museum’s monumental spiral structure, and is She was present, with a mix of restraint and pride, at a media screening before her opening.
” occupying the rotunda (of the museum); I feel incredibly grateful that she is here. This paradigmatic change is happening in the world of art and thought, which allows a mestizo indigenous woman like me to enter into a dialogue with this museum,” she tells Efe.
Vicuña also affirms that it is like “completing a circle” The fact that the spiral structure of the art gallery designed by Frank Lloyd Wright is based on Mayan art -the El Caracol observatory in Chichén Itzá; (Mexico)- and that the museum hosts at the same time an exhibition of the Russian abstract painter Vasily Kandinsky, with whom he said he shared an “ancestral line”.
“He is a mestizo, like me, and we both have roots in Lake Baikal” south of Russia, near Mongolia, he comments, again pointing to the “circular structure” of events.
The central piece, which he has created expressly for this exhibition, is “Quipu del extermination”, a textile installation in which three groups of “quipus”, colored knots used by the Indians, hang from a high ceiling. Andean genas like abacuses and that have been a central part of Vicuña’s career since the 1960s.
The quipus are presented in red, which represents blood and life ; black, death; and white, the resurrection and the lament; and they are interwoven with objects such as stones, amulets and branches with which the artist anticipates what will remain. after the extinction of the species, one of her concerns.
The work “wants to bring to light the fact that human civilization will not be possible on the planet for many more years. Many areas are no longer inhabitable due to the violence of the climate, of global warming, and this reality is changing. being hidden by the media, governments and corporations”, he maintains.
According to one of the organizers of the exhibition, the curator Geaninne Gutiérrez-Guimarães, Vicuña understands the “quipus” as “visual poems” and it can be considered a modern “quipucamayoc (accountants who deciphered the knots in the Inca empire)”.
“There is a desire and an exterminating will of all the companies that are extracting life from this planet, causing the total and absolute destruction of the environment and ancient, ancestral and traditional cultures that have memory and have survived thousands of years”, claims the artist, who claims to take that wisdom to that “reorients the total human culture”.
From the “quipu”, which will be object of a “performance” In August, the exhibition is open. composed of paintings that delve into the personal history and the imaginary of Vicuña, including a “menstruation angel”; an ironic portrait of Karl Marx; a tribute to indigenous activists such as the assassinated Berta Cáceres, and posters called “palabrarmas”, made after her exile from the Pinochet dictatorship.