Cecilia Vicuña
Parti-si-pasion
The politically engaged works of the Chilean artist and poet Cecília Vicuña’s (*1948, Chile) are tapestries of personal, national and ecological references. Weaving together different thematic threads is at the core of many of Vicuña’s performative actions. Deeply influenced by the indigenous people of the Andes, she frequently works with threads, textiles and texts. These are also symbols of female work and domesticity – another key subject addressed in Vicuña’s art. In 1966, even before graduating from the Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes de Chile, she began creating sculptural-performative interventions suggestively called “Precarious” (precarious works). A “Precarious” is an assemblage of found materials – wood sticks, leaves, stones, feathers, threads, shells, plastic and bones – which she arranges and displays in the landscape. As the name suggests, these works rapidly deteriorate and are reabsorbed by the environment. In 1972-73 (1973 being the year when the Popular Unity coalition of President Salvador Allende was overthrown by General Pinochet’s military coup), Vicuña exhibited 400 “Precarious” works as an act of political and cultural resistance: “Politically, they stand for socialism, magically they help the liberation struggle, and aesthetically they are as beautiful as they can be to comfort the soul and give strength.”)
In this performance, Vicuña wrote the words “Parti si Pasión” onto the road leading up to the World Trade Center in New York (then the most iconic capitalist power centre), using the colours of the Chilean and US American flags. Playfully de- and reconstructing the word participation she uncovers its layered meanings from passion to ambiguity, by replacing the affirmtive sí (yes) with the conditional si (if). This short video intertwines reflections on archives by combining original imagery, a performative re-enactment with browsing through her personal archive, examining materials from the collective C.A.D.A. , whose performative actions challenged the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile and in some of whose actions Vicuña was involved. She especially features the action ¡Ay Sudamérica! (see CAD 1), which calls on everyone to participate in imagining life differently. IK
courtesy Cecilia Vicuña