Cecilia Vicuña

Laudatio Cecilia Vicuña, Roswitha Haftmann Award Winner 2025

Dr. Yilmaz Dziewior, Museum Ludwig, Köln

Dear audience,

This evening, we are honouring a very special artist whose career reaches far back, yet who has only in the past six or seven years received the international attention her work deserves. Since the mid-1960s she has been working at the intersection of politics, spirituality, sexuality, ecology, visual art and poetry. She is a sculptor, painter, installation and performance artist, poet, filmmaker and activist.

Why did it take so long for Cecilia Vicuña to step into the spotlight of the international art world?

Cecilia Vicuña was born in 1948 in Santiago de Chile. She completed her Master of Fine Arts there in 1971, then studied at the Slade School of Fine Art in London from 1972 to 1973. A brief look at Chile's history explains why she did not return to her home country in 1973, but instead lived in exile: first in London, then in Bogotá, and from 1980 onwards in New York. On 11 September 1973, the Chilean military under General Augusto Pinochet - supported by the United States - overthrew the democratically elected government of socialist President Salvador Allende. A brutal military dictatorship followed, lasting until 1990, and to this day only insufficiently addressed.

Cecilia Vicuña still maintains a studio in New York, but regularly spends extended periods of time in Chile.

So the question remains: why was her art only discovered by a broader audience so late?

In my view, beyond her outsider position as a woman in a long-male-dominated art field and as an artist in exile, it was above all the multifaceted nature of her work that contributed to this belated recognition. For a long time, her sensitive and deeply political work seemed too complex and layered for many in the art world. Thus she was often better known as a poet than as a visual artist. She has published more than twenty five books, and her exhibition catalogues frequently include her own texts and poems.

Her international breakthrough came in 2017 with her participation in documenta 14 in Kassel and Athens, where her works were prominently featured. It was there that I first encountered one of her so-called Quipu works. At the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Athens, I suddenly found myself standing before an almost six-metre-high installation made of dyed wool - a deeply moving moment. Both the thematic references and the overwhelming sensuality of the work surely contributed to its wide resonance. The installation was titled Quipu Womb (The Story of the Red Thread, Athens) (2017).

Two years later, in 2019, Kunstinstituut Melly in Rotterdam presented the first survey exhibition of her work in Europe; by then, Vicuña was already 71 years old.

At the very latest since the 2022 Venice Biennale, where she received the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement, her name has become known throughout the global art world. The same year saw her large-scale exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in New York.

In 2023 and 2024 a major retrospective followed, beginning in Santiago de Chile, travelling to Buenos Aires, and most recently shown in São Paulo. Her solo exhibition at the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin is still on view until 5 July 2026, with further exhibitions already planned.

On the Quipu works

The monumental dimensions of Quipu Womb created a sense of immersion - of losing oneself within a soft yet powerful sculpture. The artist dyed the enormous strands of unprocessed wool in a luminous purple. The documenta co-curator Dieter Roelstraete described the work as a homage to a syncretic religious tradition linking the mother goddesses of the Andes with the maritime mythologies of ancient Greece.

The title Quipu refers to a historical recording device made of knotted cords, used in the Andes 5,000 years ago, both for managing inventories and for transmitting messages. In some remote regions it continued to be used until the mid-20th century.

Cecilia Vicuña describes her quipus as translations of the cosmic, bodily and spiritual meanings attributed to quipus by Indigenous peoples. In her words:

"I am translating the history of the Quipu, which has not yet been acknowledged. I translate it with my body and involve people in creating collective Quipus, ritual Quipus, to create. I do this in landscapes, in museums, on the street, anywhere I can. I see them as a metaphor for collectivity, for unity, for sensing the environment. It is a campaign that defends the human relationship to the land, because if we do not build a different relationship with the land, we will surely disappear. The land will no longer sustain us because we are destroying it. These once-mocked actions now have meaning again for people. How could this happen? I do not know. Everyone knows that we as a species are threatened."

Precario

Parallel to the Quipu works, Vicuña developed her Precario series beginning in the mid-1960s: fragile structures made of feathers, stones, plastic, wood, wires, shells and fabric - poetic fragments realized in landscapes, urban spaces or museums. These installations appear like architectural poems that fill large spaces with minimal gestures.

I remember especially her contribution to the 2022 Venice Biennale: a large Precario work combined with paintings. Many of the materials she used were collected in the Venetian lagoon - the beauty of the material and the critique of environmental destruction lying closely intertwined. The works evoke both pre-Columbian architecture and archaeological findings, but also the throwaway aesthetics of capitalism.

Her most recent Precario work, Ciudad Geométrica (Geometric City), shown in summer 2025 at Xavier Hufkens in Brüssel, clearly includes references to real and utopian Architectures.

La Ruca Abstracta (o Los ojos de Allende) (1974)

A particularly important early work is the installation La Ruca Abstracta, created for the Arts Festival for Democracy in Chile at the Royal College of Art. Together with John Dugger, David Medalla and Guy Brett, Vicuña organized this festival to raise political awareness and support for demonstrators in Chile.

The installation - a makeshift shelter of bamboo, wool and painted canvases - was walk-in. A painting of Salvador Allende served as a window: through his eyes, one could look from inside the hut to the outside world. Vicuña emphasizes that this work emerged from her early experiments with small beach huts - architectural miniatures between past and future, between dream and resistance.

Palabrarmas

Vicuña's intertwining of politics, visual art and poetry is especially evident in her Palabrarmas works, created in the 1970s in London and Bogotá. These "word-weapons" play with language, images and shifts in meaning. Although created at the same time as conceptual art, they reject its detached aesthetic and open a poetic space in which word and image merge. The title of the series can be translated not only as "word-weapons" (palabra-armas). Through the illustrations, the words transform and generate multiple meanings: palabra ("word-work") or palabrir ("word-open").

Nevertheless, these works long went largely unnoticed in both the art world and literature - perhaps precisely because they visibly cross the boundary between the two. Yet this is where the particular power of Vicuña's work lies. Her works often begin as poems and then unfold into various forms such as site-specific installations, performances, rituals, songs or films. She has always engaged deeply with Indigenous knowledge, especially as counter-narratives rooted in the exchange of information between body and earth, plants and animals.

Painting

In her oil paintings as well, politics, nature, anti-colonial critique and feminist themes intertwine. Alongside historical figures such as Marx, Lenin, Allende and Fidel Castro, hybrid beings between humans and animals appear. The paintings are characterized by a partly surrealist, partly Indigenous visual language.

Although Vicuña began painting when still a teenager, she stopped after the military coup in 1973, feeling there was "no place in the world" for these images. Many were lost or forgotten - until 2013, when Dawn Adès discovered them and exhibited several in London. The strong interest encouraged her to begin painting again. Today she sometimes recreates her early, lost works using old photographs or purely from memory.

Film

One of my favourite works is her 23-minute film What Is Poetry to You? (1980). On the streets of Bogotá she asks people - artists, poets, sex workers, children, a police officer, a scientist - what poetry means to them personally. The answers are surprising; some humorous, others very intimate, and some reflecting the specific lived experiences of those interviewed. The film makes clear that for Vicuña, culture has never been an elitist project but always something profoundly human and emancipatory.

Encounter with the artist

While preparing this laudation, I noticed how often texts about Cecilia Vicuña begin with accounts of personal encounters. At first this surprised me: after all, since post-structuralism we have learned to separate work and biography. Yet with Vicuña, this separation seems difficult. Her personality, her spiritual presence and her way of relating to the world seem too deeply woven into her work.

I too was moved when I met her for the first time three months ago; her quiet, compelling manner, her delicate yet powerful presence impressed me greatly. Everything about her seems in deep harmony with nature, even though she has lived most of her life in large cities.

Dear audience, please see for yourselves in the upcoming conversation between Elena Filipović and Cecilia Vicuña the authenticity, warmth and intelligence of this extraordinary artist.

Congratulations again, dear Cecilia.