Denouncing the destruction of the planet and weaving interconnections to stop it is what the Chilean Cecilia Vicuña is pursuing with a monumental installation at the Tate Modern in London, the culmination of the new international recognition of her half-century of ecoactivismo artistic. “I am very grateful that this recognition is beginning to take place,” says this multidisciplinary creator, celebrating an “awakening of the artistic community” to issues that, such as the rights of women and indigenous people or the preservation of ecosystems, she has been defending for 50 years .
27-meter-tall ‘quipus’ hang in Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall
In recent months, Vicuña, from 74 yearshas had his first solo exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, his first retrospective in Spain, a Golden Lion for his career at the Venice Biennale and now this exhibition at the Turbine Hall of the Tate Modern. Juan Muñoz, Louise Bourgeois, Ai Wei Wei, Anish Kapoor, Doris Salcedo, Abraham Cruzvillegas or Tania Bruguera have passed through this space, of more than 3,000 square meters with ceilings almost 30 meters high.
Now under the title ‘Brain Forest Quipu’, Vicuña exhibits until April 16 two of his famous ‘kipus’, structures of 27 meters high, made of unspun wool, jute and hemp fibers, cardboard, plaster and other materials woven and knotted into long strands that hang from metal rings fixed to the ceiling. They are two phantasmagorical figures, skeletons of a dead tropical forest, dyed a bone white that refers to trees burned by droughts and the sun.
The indigenous poet and artist has gained, at the age of 74, international recognition
The ‘quipu’ comes from a pre-Hispanic Andean tradition used by indigenous women thousands of years ago to encrypt messages through knots. And, although her works do not contain specific words, the Chilean, a poet as well as a plastic artist, sees them as “poems in space”, explains the curator, Catherine Wood. The two sculptures sway gently to the rhythm of sound compositions by Colombian Ricardo Gallo, which interweave organic sounds from the jungle with rhythms and music from around the world.
Weigh to symbolize the death of the jungles, the work also “thinks more positively about how we intertwine as a social fabric of human beings,” explains Wood. Thus, the sculptural and sound parts are joined by social gatherings that will allow people of different origins and ages to debate how to stop the destruction of ecosystems.
Image of the spectacular installation by the Chilean artist at the Tate Modern
There is also a digital part that, through videos of indigenous people recounting the degradation of their habitats, seeks to take advantage of the Tate platform to launch an alert message. “In ten years the Earth will look like it has never looked before. It is time to wake up,” says Vicuña about the climate emergency.
The artist conceived her two sculptures as a mother and her son, whose intergenerational union is essential to change a world in which “one no longer listens to oneself, nor to the person who suffers with them”. The Chilean artist is an “inspiration for many artists, as a tireless champion of ecological awareness and social justice as well as creator of powerful and impressive works of art«, considers Frances Morris, director of the Tate Modern.
Vicuña trained in London in the 1970s, before living in exile in Bogotá and New York for decades after the coup in Chile. Half a century later, she weaved into her ‘Brain Forest Quipu’ pieces of ceramics and other objects found in the mud by women from London’s Latin American communities, in a new connection to a long-standing eco-activism and eco-feminism that is now receiving full recognition.