Internationally acclaimed as a poet and visual artist, Cecilia Vicuna is also a political activist and founding member of Artists for Democracy. Since the mid-60s, she has worked with abandoned materials and rubbish to create works of art she calls "precarios"--fragile constructions of string, bark, pebbles: small boats left floating in city puddles, handwoven nets strung across rivers. In her poetry, Vicuna combines Andean vernacular with other languages to form highly condensed metaphors, puns, and anagrams, thus inventing language looms on which meaning is woven. Indeed, in the ancient language of the Inkas, "weaving" and "language" are the same word. The book's unique design incorporates an elaborately illustrated artist's book by Vicuna and a collection of critical essays that consider her work in its Latin American and global context.

The Precarious / QUIPOem: The Art and Poetry of Cecilia Vicuña (Wesleyan Poetry Series)

Literature & Fiction

Vicuña, Cecilia

History & Criticism

Wesleyan University Press

Saborami

History

Americas

Beau Geste Press

Poetry. Art. Includes drawings by the writer. Cecilia Vicuna's INSTAN is composed in handwrittenlines that move across the page with the instantaneousfeeling of marks in a private journal, the booktransmits the energy of her performative works, wherethread and poetic lines play at being one. The word/drawings are certain and fragile. In theirpower to preserve and transform, they offer hope inart and daily speech for radical change. "Cecilia Vicuna, born and raised in Santiago de Chile, has been an exile since the early 1970s. Vicuna has never accepted the boundaries between cultural disciplines, creating a terrain of her own ..." Lucy Lippard, "The Precarious" The Art and Poetry of Cecilia Vicuna."

Instan

Poetry

Kelsey Street Press

Poetry. Latinx Studies. Art. Edited by Rosa Alcalá. NEW AND SELECTED POEMS OF CECILIA VICUÑA is a telling of old cultures, modern nation states and lives in exile. Rodrigo Toscano calls Vicuña's poetry "the outer out, beyond nation states, passed 'inter state' affairs, in other words, close in, as close as we get to our fair planet's sources, and to each other." In this bilingual collection, Vicuña and her translator, Rosa Alcalá, are artist witnesses to a natural world that is a storehouse of sacred words, seeds, threads and songs. Present everywhere, they are sources for a rebalancing in human relationships and for new forms of grace and healing. In Vicuña's vision, art is life and intimacy with it is transformative.

New and Selected Poems of Cecilia Vicuña

Precario/precarious

Tanam Press

Sandra Vásquez de la Horra: The Awake Volcanoes

Arts & Photography

Heinrich, Christoph

Fonseca, Raphael

Individual Artists

Scala

Contributions by Surpik Angelini, Laura Hoptman, David Levi Strauss.

Cecilia Vicuna: Cloud-Net

Hoptman, Laura

Levi Strauss, David

Angelini, Surpik

Art in General Inc

Poetry. Latino/Latina Studies. Art. First published in 1973, two months after the military coup in Chile, Cecilia Vicuña's SABORAMI is a document of the times and the way in which history can change art. It is filled with the urgent hope that art, too, can change history. Put together when Vicuña was just twenty-five years old, the poems, paintings, and objects of SABORAMI enact a complex and multidimensional conversation. The meanings of the works (which were created over a seven year period) shifted radically after the events of September 11, 1973. Their meanings continue to shift and resonate in light of political events today. This recreation of the original SABORAMI is published with a new afterword Vicuña wrote especially for this edition.

ChainLinks

Poetry/Performance. Latino/Latina Studies. Art. Edited by Rosa Alcalá. SPIT TEMPLE collects texts and transcriptions of Vicuña's uncategorizable improvised performances, which combine singing, movement, chants, and stories. Also included are a critical introduction by Rosa Alcalá, a poetic memoir by Vicuña (translated by Alcalá) addressing her life in performance, and a series of response pieces from contemporary writers including Juliana Spahr, Rodrigo Toscano, and Maria Damon. "Vicuña's work, at its very essense, is 'a way of remembering'—as if exile and recall joined to unravel an 'autobiography in debris;' as one personal story within a larger narative."—Roberto Tejada

Spit Temple

Ugly Duckling Presse

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Books by Vicuña, Cecilia