Curated by Miguel A. López, Cecilia Vicuña’s “Soñar el agua. Una retrospectiva del futuro (1964–)” (Dreaming Water. A Retrospective of the Future [1964–]) opens with a small but powerful painting: La muerte de allende (Allende’s Death), 1973. The quasi-Surrealist, quasi-Symbolist oil-on-canvas depicts a vast crimson wound oozing onto a fractured landscape strewn with skeletal human remains. Made on the evening of September 11, 1973, after Augusto Pinochet’s military coup against Salvador Allende and the latter’s subsequent suicide, the artwork foretells the intergenerational and multifaceted violence that Pinochet’s regime advanced in collaboration with the US government. Vicuña’s little painting sets the scene for the artist’s most comprehensive retrospective to date, with more than 150 artworks and dozens of archival documents, many of which have never been exhibited before, and situates Vicuña in local art history.
Vicuña left Chile in 1972 to study in London and, after the coup, never lived there again permanently. But her practice began in the mid-1960s in Santiago, where she worked both independently and with the collective Tribu No across poetry, manifestos, participation, performance, collaboration, drawing, painting, collage, and sculpture, establishing a commitment to radical transnational solidarity and Latin American Indigenous knowledges as the basis of her art. Tamaiti, 1966, an early earth-pigment painting, represents the artist’s dialogue with Indigenous peoples across the Pacific, particularly Polynesia. Her most famous works, the quipus (wool installations based on Incan accounting and documentary systems) engage global ecological crises and healing and appear in a variety of forms, such as the staggering Quipu Menstrual (La Sangre de los Glaciares) (Menstrual Quipu [The Blood of the Glaciers]), 2006, which hangs in the museum’s foyer.
Much of the exhibition explores Vicuña’s anti-imperialist and anticolonialist transnational solidarity—for instance, with Vietnamese and African as well as African American people (Angela Davis features in a drawing and a painting)—but primarily with the Chilean people, el pueblo. López displays scores of the artist’s poems, paintings, pamphlets, textiles, posters, sculptures, videos, and photos, many from the 1970s, dedicated to el pueblo. He devotes a gallery to Vicuña’s London-based collective, Artists for Democracy, founded in 1974 to stage the Arts Festival for Democracy in Chile (AFDC) at the Royal College of Art alongside mass protests at Trafalgar Square. La ruca abstracta (o los ojos de allende) (The Abstract Ruca [or the Eyes of Allende]), 1974/2023, an installation originally created for AFDC and re-created for this retrospective, is contextualized with archival footage, including a 1974 BBC documentary on Vicuña.
Given the ephemeral and, as she says, “precario” (precarious, contingent, insecure) nature of Vicuña’s work, much has been lost and subsequently reconstructed for this exhibition. One gallery, for instance, displays newly printed photographs documenting a 1979 action—spilling glasses of milk on the streets of Bogota—Vicuña performed in solidarity with influential Chilean art collective CADA (Colectivo Acciones de Arte) following a call out as part of their itinerant and iconic work Para No Morir de Hambre en el Arte (So As Not to Starve in Art) of the same year. While Chilean art history has canonized CADA, it has sometimes ignored Vicuña. López argues in his contribution to the monograph Veroír el fracaso iluminado (Seehearing the Enlightened Failure, 2021), which accompanied an earlier retrospective of the artist’s work, that this is because she was not aligned with the preferred aesthetics of anti-dictatorial resistance, namely, the local mode of Conceptualism known as la escena de avanzada (the Advanced Scene). Vicuña’s precarious art reminds us that marginal, inconvenient, anticolonial histories and archives are fragile. However, they survive and return to affect history in oblique ways. Can local art history remake itself as a home for Vicuña this time around?
— Verónica Tello