“Gratitude and joy! I never imagined that someone like me, a mestizo from the unwanted side of the world, would receive the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement … If it was possible, then everything is possible! (laughs) This is the time that generations and generations of women have dreamed of for millennia ». The smile extraordinarily sweet and velvety voice of Cecilia Vicuña – Chilean New Yorker by adoption – come via Zoom from Santiago (“I’m here with my mother, who is 96: she’s fantastic!”).
The motivation for recognition? He explains it Cecilia Alemani, curator from the Biennial 2022. «She is an artist – she ranges from painting to performance to complex assemblages – and a poet; she has spent years preserving the literary works of Latin American writers. She is also an activist fighting for the rights of indigenous peoples. For decades you have worked on the sidelines, with humility and obstinacy, anticipating the debates on ecology and feminism ».
Cecilia Vicuña (photo William Jess Laird).
“Wild children”
Congratulations! In a tragic era like ours, however, one wonders what the role of art could be.
César Vallejo, the Peruvian poet, said the most important thing: to push hearts towards justice, towards what makes us human. It is a system that guides us as terrestrial magnetism guides birds in migrations: it does not only involve the mind, it is a complex matter. The Quechua of the Andes have a suitable term: sonqonthe energy of the heart that moves in action, in beauty, in generosity.
But does the artist have a social responsibility or does he respond only to the Muses?
Both are true. The Muses are not related to the single individual, it is Western nonsense. I work a lot with the indigenous oral tradition of Chile (to preserve it in 2009 he founded the NGO Oysi with his comrade James O’Hern, ed) where there is this beautiful concept: if an artist thinks that it is she – or he – who is acting, his understanding is clouded because in truth these languages come from ancient sources and work through us.
When did you first understand that art wanted to speak through you?
My mother always remembers – I was maybe two years old – that she called me for lunch and I replied: “No, I’m painting!” (smiles). At nine I realized: oh, I’m a writer! I was born into a family – paternal branch of Basque and Italian origin, indigenous maternal branch – of artists and intellectuals, where many women were sculptors. A clan of about 20 people who lived freely in nature as a community, one hour from Santiago. A wonderful mix of European and native migrants, who had welcomed Jews who fled during the Shoah and Spaniards who fled Francoism… It was an era of peace and creativity for Chile, the one that would have led to the democratic election of Salvador Allende.
Cecilia Vicuña in her studio (photo William Jess Laird).
“The wind, the sun”
A fairytale childhood.
My parents were very young when I was born. My mother greeted me in the morning: “See you later”, and she disappeared for the whole day. I was left alone in the middle of the large irrigation canals: I could have drowned, but it didn’t happen: the frogs, the wind, the sun took care of me. I felt embraced and protected by nature, and so I still feel. But then…
But then?
When I was nine, my parents decided we couldn’t continue being wild children, wandering around naked (laughs) among the creatures of the forest. We moved to Santiago, I was enrolled in an English school: most of the classmates were much richer than me, tall and blond, while I was short and dark-skinned: I was intensely bullied. My answer? I began to tell fantastic, astounding stories. The teacher noticed it and, one day, he made me tell the story in front of the class. I believe that was my saving grace: they could no longer bully me because I had the words!
Cecilia Vicuña during a performance (photo Daniela Aravena).
Soon at the Guggenheim
Which role model inspired you?
The women of the family, free and strong sculptors, who fully participated in political and intellectual life: my first quipu (“Textile sculptures” that recall the Inca system of calculation with ropes and knots, ed) I created it after leafing through a book on pre-Columbian artifacts in my aunt, Rosa Vicuña’s study. For poetry, my grandfather: lawyer – persecuted and imprisoned – who fought for civil rights (in 1948 he defended Neruda from the Videla government), writer, friend of Gabriela Mistral (first Latin American to win the Nobel Prize for literature, ed).
And for painting?
Leonora Carrington. As a teenager I had torn a reproduction of a painting of her from a magazine and pasted it onto a wooden board.
The title of the Biennale 2022, The Milk of Dreams / The Milk of Dreams, is inspired by Carrington. Do you believe in signs?
Of course! When I was 20, Leonora invited me to stay in her home in Mexico City. Crossing the patio I saw her study, with giant windows: that was a world of dreams!
An example of female solidarity. Rarity?
Quite rare, yes. However, I could mention others. My grandmothers, first of all. Like my mother, they loved what they saw in me, and this allowed me to express myself: seeing beauty in others is a very powerful creative act. Fundamental, in 1980 (before the protagonists of the artistic environment became individualistic and business-oriented), also the moment of New York. Arriving for a performance from London (where I was in exile after the 1973 coup), I was greeted by a feminist group, theHeresies Collective: a wonderful experience, I even moved.
No gender
But is there a “feminine way” or is art no gender?
In reality, being a woman means being no gender (laughs). According to the indigenous perspective, gender is relative: each embodies one or the other in the various periods of life. Look at the children, who have no perception that they are male or female. In some Andean communities there is the idea that women are women of childbearing age, but – if they get older – they become males: often the heads of the family are the elderly. Men get weaker over the years, we get stronger.
From a practical point of view, what does it mean to be a female artist?
It means being censored, ridiculed, ignored, marginalized. It has happened to me all my life. The interest in my work is recent, it started in 2017 with documents 14 (the contemporary art event held in Kassel, Germany, while Cecilia Vicuña will soon be celebrated with an exhibition at Guggenheim in New York ed). We women have been freed from feminism, but we don’t need feminism only: it affects everyone.
The “Leoparda de Ojitos” painted by Cecilia Vicuña in 1977 (Courtesy the Artist_Lehmann Maupin).
“Guardian of the spirit”
Today they call it eco-feminist, but it was already when the term didn’t even exist.
Exactly (laughs)! We already knew that water would be a planetary emergency in the 1960s, I learned it in high school, but we ignored it. Nobody can teach you the connection with nature, you have to experience it. My works of the series that I have defined as “precarious art” – made with the debris that the sea brings to the beach – are an invitation to recover the ability to listen: nature talks to us constantly while we remain deaf. And dumb. We must reopen ourselves to that sensitivity that everyone has.
(She arranges her hair, very long)
Is there a reason to keep them so long?
Yes. As a young man, every time I went through a crisis or a transformation I cut them. Now I let them be, let it be…
“Let it be”: a philosophy that belongs to you?
And for quite a while. I became passionate about Taoism as a teenager: I discovered Lao Tse, the founder of the doctrine, and his Tao Te Chingthe Book of the Way and Virtue. Which, among other things, invites us to take an example from water.
Nomen omen. He thought of correspondences between the surname – vicuña is the Andean animal from which the vicuna is derived – and art?
Oh yes! I even painted a self portrait where I am half human and half animal! The vicuñas stand near the springs, they are the guardians of the water spirit. And that has always been my mission …
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