Quipu Womb (The Story of the Red Thread, Athens) - Cecilia Vicuña“Although better known

Quipu Womb (The Story of the Red Thread, Athens) - Cecilia Vicuña

“Although better known as a poet in her adoptive North American home (she has lived in New York since the 1980s), Cecilia Vicuña has stayed true to her youthful calling as a genre-bending visual artist for more than forty years, and her site-specific projects highlight the artist’s talent for composing poems in space, for a visceral lyricism in three dimensions. Vicuña refers to these particular works as ‘quipoems’—a contraction of poem and quipu; an online dictionary defines quipu, rather reductively, as ‘a device consisting of a cord with knotted strings of various colors attached, used by the ancient Peruvians for recording events, keeping accounts, etc.’ A pre-Columbian type of writing, in other, more poetical words—product of a literary tradition that has given the world such luminaries as Gabriela Mistral, Pablo Neruda, and Nicanor Parra. Vicuña, who was born in 1948 in Santiago de Chile, is supremely aware of the weight of Indigenous history anchoring twentieth-century Latin American culture.

“Blown up to the monumental proportions of immersive ‘soft sculpture,’ her recent Athenian quipoem consists of giant strands of untreated wool, sourced from a local Greek provider, dyed a startling crimson in honor of a syncretic religious tradition that, via the umbilical cord of menstrual symbolism, connects Andean mother goddesses with the maritime mythologies of ancient Greece.”

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