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Abstract
In 2006, Chilean artist Cecilia Vicuña carried thick-knotted red strands of unspun wool to Cerro El Plomo, a glaciated peak outside of Santiago. Done in response to government-sanctioned acquisitions of gold and silver mines sitting under the glacier by a Canadian corporation, Vicuña’s use of her quipu – an ancient mnemonic device – tied the historical disappearance of the Incan empire to an ecological devastation occurring in the new millennium. Her actions also referenced the Pinochet dictatorship, as well as her own exile when in 1979, she traveled to Colombia and with a red string tied to a glass of milk, spilled its contents in front of the historical home of the 19th century revolutionary leader Simón Bolivar. This pointed to the disappearance of the Allende government who promised a free milk distribution program in Chile and referenced the nearly 2,000 children who died from tainted milk in Bogotá that same year. The connection between these two projects and much of Vicuña’s work is the reliance on the thread – it critiques the military apparatus as much as it calls attention to those voices lost through colonization. I argue for an analysis of the textual layers existing within Vicuña’s fiber art, from the seemingly banal strands used in her installations and performances to their integration into her lines of poetry featuring the indigenous language of Mapudungun from the Mapuche people. In examining how these constructed fibers enter into everyday language and metaphorically address issues around identity, my paper analyzes the discourse centered on disappearance and its ties to artistic production occurring in Vicuña’s cross-cultural practice.
Notes
1 Bachelet, the elected president, had suffered from torture alongside her mother under the Pinochet regime, as did her father who ultimately died at the hands of his torturer.
2 Cecilia Vicuña, QUIPOem, trans. Esther Allen (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1997): 55–54.
3 Simon Bolivar, nicknamed “el Libertador,” was a South American general and politician, an emblematic figure of liberation struggle of the Spanish colonies in South America from 1813, and in particular of Colombia. These desaparecidos are both those who are innocently killed by tainted milk, as well as those who disappeared at the hands of the ongoing of the 19th of April Movement, a guerrilla faction that later became a briefly active political party in Colombia. The group went so far as to steal a sword of Simon Bolivar’s in order to announce its armed activity and hijacked milk trucks to distribute milk to the poor.
4 The Rettig Report was carried out in 1991 following the end of the Pinochet presidency. The Valech commission followed up and released its latest figures in 2011.
5 In response to the performances in Bogotá and Santiago, artist Eugenio Tellez drank a glass of milk in front of the Toronto City Hall in Canada.
6 A golpe is the Spanish word referring to a coup d’etat; it also refers to a sudden change or shock.
7 Cecilia Vicuña, email to Rosa Alcalá, “Introduction,” Spit Temple: The Selected Performances of Cecilia Vicuña (Brooklyn, NH: Ugly Duckling Presse, 2012), 26.
8 “Palabrarmas” is not a true Spanish word but a conglomeration of “palabra” (word) and “armas” (weapons). Vicuña occasionally pulls together two words to highlight their political potential and has since named them “palabrarmas.”
9 Gabriela Mistral was originally pitted against Pablo Neruda during the military dictatorship, with her face being used on the highest bill in Chilean currency. See Larry Rohter, “‘Mother of the Nation,’ Poet and Lesbian?; Gabriela Mistral of Chile Re-Examined” New York Times, published June 4, 2003.
10 Diana Haughney, “Defending Territory, Demanding Participation: Mapuche Struggles in Chile,” Latin American Perspectives 185, 39:4 (July 2012): 202; Macarena Gómez-Barris, “Mapuche Hunger Acts: Epistemology of the Decolonial,” Transmodernity: Journal of Peripheral Culture Production of the Luso-Hispanic World 1:3 (2012): 122.
11 Alonso de Ercilla y Zuñiga, “The Araucaniad (excerpt)” in The Oxford Book of Latin American Poetry, eds. Cecilia Vicuña and Ernesto Livon Grosman, (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 1–12.
12 Haughney, “Defending Territory,” 202.
13 Gómez-Barris, “Mapuche Hunger Acts,” 122.
14 See Rubén Stehberg and Gonzalo Sotomayor, “Mapocho Incaico” Boletín del Museo Nacional de Historia Natural, Chile, 61:85–149 (2012).
15 Biography of Cecilia Vicuña, The Oxford Book of Latin American Poetry, 477.
16 See La Nueva Canción: The New Song Movement in South America, Smithsonian Folk Ways Recordings, accessed May 14, 2018, https://folkways.si.edu/la-nueva-cancion-new-song-movement- south-america/latin-world-struggle-protest/music/article/smithsonian
17 Nueva Canción recordings were seized, burned, and banned from the airwaves and record stores. In a period in Chilean history referred to as the Apagón Cultural—the Cultural Blackout, the military government exiled and imprisoned artists and went as far as to ban many traditional Andean instruments in order to suppress the Nueva Canción movement.
18 Jara was kidnapped and tortured by the dictatorship, and was shot dead with his body left in a street in Santiago on September 12, 1973. Parra committed suicide in her home in 1967 and was survived by her children, of which two were also active in the Nueva Canción movement. The peñas set up by Parra and her children would reach far and wide, spanning to Los Angeles in the United States.
19 Cecilia Vicuña, “An Introduction to Mestizo Poetics,” in The Oxford Book of Latin American Poetry, xxv.
20 Cecilia Vicuña, “Performing Memory: An Autobiography,” in Spit Temple: The Selected Performances of Cecilia Vicuña, trans. Rose Alcalá (Brooklyn: Ugly Duckling Press, 2012): 58.
21 Juliet Lynd, “Precarious Resistance: Weaving Opposition in the Poetry of Cecilia Vicuña,” PMLA 120, 5 (2005): 1590.
22 Cecilia Vicuña, “The No Manifesto of Tribu No,” in Manifestos and polemics in Latin American modern art, ed. Patrick Frank (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2017): 205–6.
23 Carol Hutchinson, ed. The Chile Reader: History, Culture, Politics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013): 72.
24 Vicuña, QUIPOem, 27.
25 M. Catherine de Zegher, “Ouvrage: Knot a Not, Notes as Knots,” in The Precarious: The Art and Poetry of Cecilia Vicuña (Hanover: Wesleyan University Press, 1997): 19. Although, de Zheger’s text seems convincing, it has a dated connotation to pre-hispanic Mayan culture without analyzing the contextualization; the English language places the “head” of the bed at the top and the “foot” of the bed at the bottom, however with no veritable metaphor of spatial reality.
26 Tim Ingold, The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling, and Skill (London: Routledge, 2000): 345.
27 Pachamama is the Inca/Quechua goddess associated with the earth and is translated as “mother earth.” She is often described as the wife of either the Creator god Pachacamac or the sun god Inti, and was frequently depicted as a serpent or dragon. Among modern Quechuas, Pachamama is often associated with the Virgin Mary. Today, the preservation of Pachamama has become the platform of many South American presidents including Evo Morales (Bolivia) and Rafael Correa (Ecuador), although they are consistently at odds with the NGO Pachamama.org. See “The Politics of Pachamama: Natural Resource Extraction vs. Indigenous Rights and the Environment in Latin America” by Benjamin Dangl, http://upsidedownworld.org/main/international-archives-60/4816-the-politics-of-pachamama-natural- resource-extraction-vs-indigenous-rights-and-the-environment-in-latin-america
28 Lynd, “Precarious Resistance,” 1590.
29 Diana Taylor, “Acts of Transfer,” in The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Durham, NC: Duke University Press), 24.
30 Vicuña, “Performing Memory” Spit Temple, 76.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Jacqueline Witkowski
Jacqueline Witkowski is a PhD candidate in the Department of Art History, Visual Art & Theory at the University of British Columbia. Her dissertation, “Disappearing Threads: Art, Text, and Textile during Dictatorships in Argentina, Brazil, and Chile,” examines the intersections between aesthetics and politics conveyed through the practices of textile and fiber artwork and poetry in Latin America. Her wider interests include feminist and queer theory, modes of collaboration and participation, and art as activism. Witkowski has presented her work at institutions throughout North and South America and in Europe, and has published on the history of craft within digital and tactile warfare, labour and craft, textile explorations in 1950s Brazil, and the examination of feminism in 1960s Brazilian photography. Her research has been generously funded by Mitacs Globalink and the Center for Craft, Creativity, and Design.[email protected]