By Alliance Communications Coordinator Amy Durr
It’s a pleasure in honor of Earth Month 2026 to contemplate the visceral art of Cecilia Vicuña. Born in Chile and exiled to London in her early 20s, “Vicuña’s multidisciplinary practice frequently addresses themes of ecological art, feminist perspectives, and decolonial practices, often drawing on Indigenous cultural heritage. Her work encompasses performance, poetry, drawing, painting, video, and installations, including…renowned quipus,” according to Heni News.
What a lush, generous and collaborative universe Vicuña’s art generates and reflects. Vicuña describes the origin of her signature quipus:
“Quipu means knot in Quechua. It is a system of encoding information through knots that are so complex that can convey as much information as the Phoenician alphabet, which is the writing system that we use in the West. So this system of encoding information in knots was used for almost 5,000 years in the Andes, until the conquest.
“I suppose when I met the quipu I was flabbergasted at the notion that this incredible system existed and it had been taken away from us. Erased from our cultural memory. A knot is a gathering of energy and if you extend that to the history of five thousand years of quipu making, everybody who has ever been connected to the quipu is connected to a field of knowledge, a field of love and understanding.” – Cecilia Vicuña, Your Rage is Your Gold
This reminded me of our discussion last month about epigenetics, the genetic transfer of trauma from previous generations. As we transfer trauma to new generations, we can also transfer love and understanding in the form of art, ecological knowledge and positive cultural memories.
All Art is Political, Especially When You’re Exiled
It’s amazing how Vicuña imbued her art, all created far from home, with her indigenous knowledge, love for the natural world and deep caring. Here are her words as she talks about her long career in Your Rage is Your Gold, a 7-minute video produced by the Tate Modern:
“I have had a political orientation in my art from day one, but that is because I was a teenager when I read, I understood, that the life of this planet was endangered.
“My name is Cecilia Vicuña. I’m a poet and artist. I was born in Chile. When I first came to London, I arrived in September of 1972. I got a grant from the British Council to come study here. I was here for just a few months when the military coup occurred in Chile and therefore I did not return.
“So that’s how I became an exile. Since then I have never been able to live in Chile again.”
Precarity as a Liminal Artistic Space
“I call my art Arte Precario – precarious art. Precarious because it disappears. Because it’s fragile. Because it’s vulnerable. Whether it is a twig, a stone, a piece of metal, a piece of plastic – everything to me feels alive with history, with decay, with the potential and possibility of dying, of dissolving, and for me that is its beauty.”
“It is a conscious choice on my part to focus on what is dying and disappearance. The reason for that is that when I was young everything that was decaying was regenerating life.
“Now we have created the terminal death. A new kind of death in this planet. A kind of death that did not exist, that was not created by a biological process. This new kind of death continues to be my focus, and that’s why all the materials that you see are shredded, falling apart and about to become nothing. Because that is what may happen to us as a species very soon unless we wake up in time to protect the ecosystems that we are destroying right now.”
I find myself returning to that phrase — terminal death. Do we have a word or even a concept for things that never come back? Vicuña has been making art about this for fifty years. We are just now beginning to understand what she meant.
Art as Collaboration and Co-Creation
“I began collaborating to create my art in the 60s. The audience and I become co-creators. It is an invitation for us to share so that we can acknowledge that experience is not just our own experience. Experience is what we experience together and that creates many points of view. And many points of view have to be aware of each other so that there is no oppression or domination.”