Ecophrastic Weaving: Cecilia Vicuña’s Multidimensional Ecopoetics in Kon Kon

Abstract

A word in the air lets you hear the image see the sound –Cecilia Vicuña, “K’isa/Alangó/A Vibratory Disorder” It is difficult to undo our own damage, and to recall to our presence that which we have asked to leave. –Annie Dillard, “Teaching a Stone to Talk” By all accounts, 2022 was a banner year for Chilean poet and multi-medium artist Cecilia Vicuña. From May until September, she had a celebrated solo exhibition, Spin, Spin Triangulene, at the Guggenheim in New York and an equally heralded multimedia Tate Modern exhibition, Brain Forest Quipu, which opened in October. Earlier in the year, along with the German sculptor Katharina Fritsch, Vicuña won the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the 2022 Venice Biennale. Vicuña responded to this great honor in part by saying that she believes “art and consciousness can play a role in the urgent need to move away from violence and destruction, to save our environment from impeding collapse [ … ] we badly need to find a new way of being on Earth” (“Venice Biennale”). Her concern with the power of art to modify ontological preoccupations, especially as they relate to human-to-nonhuman interrelations, has long been part of her worldview. Perhaps this is what Cecilia Alemani, the curator for the 59th International Art Exhibition at the Venice Biennale means when she expressed that, “Vicuña has travelled her own path, doggedly, humbly, and meticulously, anticipating many recent ecological and feminist debates and envisioning new personal and collective mythologies” (“Venice Biennale”). Clearly, many aspects of Vicuña’s oeuvre have anticipated the climate crisis by recognizing the importance of ecological thought in art and literature. In a 2013 interview, for example, she says that “toda la poesía pertenece a la tierra” [“all poetry belongs to the earth”] (Personal interview).1 She further explains that Indigenous poetry from around the world has always been “dedicado a escuchar al mundo suprahumano, al mundo más allá de lo humano” [“dedicated to listening to the suprahuman world, to the more-than-human world”]. Vicuña’s answer both rejects restrictions on poetry and accepts the idea that poetry always places humanity in a larger interconnected community and an ontological mesh of life. Her work speaks to an ecological or environmental reality by uncovering and listening to the human-to-nonhuman interrelationships of the world.