Cecilia Vicuña, Saturday Afternoon Conversation #1: Platform as Practice – Collaborative Organizing
May 15, 2020
On the opening day of PLATFORM 2020: Utterances From The Chorus, Chilean born interdisciplinary artist, author, and poet Cecilia Vicuña offered a poetic performance that called on every person in the room to participate.
She ended her offering with these words in response to the themes introduced in the opening panel discussion between the Platform curatorial team.
Curators Okwui Okpokwasili and Judy Hussie-Taylor, and the full team at Danspace Project thank Cecilia for her poetic wisdom and generous spirit.
Video by Mariana Gongora.
Artist-poet Cecilia Vicuña creates songs, performances, installations, paintings, films, written works, books, lectures, and sculptures. Vicuña’s work is always attentive to ethics, the earth, and history. Her object making includes “precarios” – precarious works – composed of fragile materials that disappear, regenerating the life force, and large-scale installations of “quipus,” dyed wool and fibers inspired by the complex Andean record keeping system of sets of knotted cords. Her improvisatory, participatory performances emphasize the collective nature of action and creativity to bring forth justice, balance and transformation of the world.
Cecilia Vicuña’s solo exhibit “About to Happen” opened at MoCA North Miami in December, 2019. Her retrospective “Seehearing the Enlightened Failure” recently traveled from the Witte de With in Rotterdam to MUAC in Mexico City, where it opened in February, 2020. Her works are included in the collections of Tate London, MoMA New York, Guggenheim Museum, Museo de Arte Contemporaìneo de Chile, Museo de Arte de Lima and Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes de Santiago de Chile. In 2017, her work was part of the 14th Documenta in Athens, Greece and Kassel, Germany. Vicuña is the author of 25 books