The Precarious

The Art and Poetry of Cecilia Vicuna

edited by M. Catherine de Zegher

qui pOem
•

Cecilia Vicuna

translated by Esther Allen

Through the generosity of:

THe ANDY WARHOL FouNDATION FOR THE VISUAL ARTS, NEw YoRK.
THE FLEMISH COMMUNITY OF BELGIUM.
The Precarious
The Art and Poetry of Cecilia Vicufia

edited by IVI. Catherine de Zegher

KANAAL ART FouNDATION

- KoRTRIJK, BELGIUM -

WESLEYAN UNIVERSITY PRESS

Published by

UNIVERSITY PRESS OF NEW ENGLAND

- HANOVER & LONDON -
UNIVERSITY PRESS OF NEW ENGLAND
publishes books under its own imprim and is the publisher for
Brandeis University Press, Dartmouth College, Middleb ury College Press,
University of New Hampshire, Tufts University, and Wesl eya n University Press.

WESLEYAN UNIVERSITY PRESS

Published by University P re ss of New England, Hanover 'H 03755
,

© 1997 by Cecilia Vicuiia and Kanaal Art Foundation.

/\II rights reserved.

Edited by M. Catherine de Zcgher.

Designed by Luc Derycke.

Printed in Be lgi um 5 4 3 2 1

ISBN: 0-8195-6324-2
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 97-61784
 CONTENTS

SPIN INC THE CoMMON THREAD Lucy R. Lippard . ... .... ... .......... . . ..
.. .. .......... . .. ...
.. .. ......... . .. . . p.
. 7

OuvRAGE: KNOT A NoT, NoTES AS KNOTS M. Catherine de Zegher................................... p. 17

METAPHOR SPUN:
A CONVERSATION WITH CECILIA ViCUNA Billie jean Isbell and Regina Harrison . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . p. 47

CRYPTIC WEAVING Hugo Mer:�dez-Rarn(rez.. ............................................................... p. 59

SouND WRITTEN AND SouND BREATH ING:

VERSIONS OF PALPABLE PoETICS Kenneth Sherwood ........ . ...... ........ ... .......... . .... .
............... . .. p. 73

Biographical Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ....... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ..................... . ............. p.

Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . p. ix

Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .......... . ...... . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ...... . . . . . ........ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . p. >..'ll

5
Untitled, Hudson Street., New Yorh, 1989. Photo: Cesar Paternosto.
 S PINNING THE COMMON THREAD

Lucy R. Lippard

The wild vicuna is sacred to indigenous Andean cultures. "She lives on the highest places,
s � she is considered not to belong to the humans, but to the apus, the lords." The strong
fibers of her wool (with a molecular structure that provides the best defense against the
cold) long provided warmth and wealth, before the Spaniards replaced ecologically bal­
anced native herds of domesticated llamas and alpacas, wild vicunas and guanacos, with
cattle and sheep whose cloven feet and habit of uprooting vegetation eroded the terrain and
made its people poor. (In the Chilean vernacular, "no tengo lana-I have no wool-still
means "I have no money.") L_E;gend has iJ: that vicunas are born at the sources of springs,
and the fiber made from their wool is symbolically associated with the thread of running
water, or the stream of life.

C ecilia Vicuna, born and raised in Santiago de Chile, has been an exile since
the early 1970s, when the murder of elected president Salvador Allende by
General Pinochet found her in London. As a poet and painter, she had been a
supporter of Allende's Popular Unity government, and participated in the cultur­
al vitality that accompanied it. In London she became active in the Chilean sol­
idarity movement and was a founding member (with Guy Brett, John Dugger, and
David Medalla) of Artists for Democracy. As "Festival Coordinator," she was the
chief organizer of the Arts Festival for Democracy in Chile at the Royal College
of Art in 1974. In 1977, she returned to Latin America, settling_in Bogota,
Colombia, where she worked with theater and music groups. She made stage sets
for Candelaria and Quilapayun, and, on her own, traveled around the country
lecturing on the Chilean struggle, reading her poetry, or creating workshops for

7
Lucy R. Lippard

8
'
Left: Violeta Parra, 1'ejedora del mundo
(Violeta Parra, Weaver of rhe World),
London, 1973. Oil on canvas, 58 x 48
. �

' '',.._
em. Collection of the artist.
..,.,.. .. . .

. .

Right: Angel de Ia Menstmaci.6n (The

Angel of Menstruation), London, 1973.
Oil on canvas, 58 x 48 em. Collection of
the artist.

indigenous peoples. In 1980 she arrived in New York, and two weeks later was liv­
ing with the Argentine painter and writer Cesar Paternosto, whom she married in
1981. They now spend several months a year in Latin America.
Vicuna has never accepted the boundaries between cultural disciplines, creat­
ing a terrain of her own in the interstices-the role of the mestizo, or the coyote.
She is best known as a poet, but she had a successful career as a painter in Chile
before leaving for London. There she continued to write (sometimes using the
pseudonym Maria Santiago), but turned to banners and sculpture as visual out­
lets. In Bogota she painted, did theatrical design, performed street actions, and
made a 16mm film based on interviews with prostitutes, policemen, beggars,
activists, and shantytown dwellers-What Is Poetry To You? (1980). I n the 1970s,
two television films and a feature documentary (by Wolf Tirado, since lost) were
made about her.
Vicuna has also edited "Palabra Sur," a series of Latin American literature for
Graywolf Press (1986-89). Since 1966, however, the consistent element in her
artmaking has been the precarios, a series of very small sculptures and installa­
tions constructed of found objects, or "rubbjsh," made in landscape, streets, or
studio. Precario!Precarious is the title of a book of poetry published in New York
by Tanam Press in 1983 (with illustrations of the sculptures), and the precarios
were the basis of her installation at Exit Art in New York.
The first precarios were made in 1966, in the Chilean countryside, and the first
portable precari o-the heart of a basket, painted, and held like a wand-was made
on Vicuna's balcony in Santiago in ]967. "A force impelled me to do the precarios,"
she recalls, "a desire to expand. They began as a form of communing with the sun
and the sea that gave me a lot of pleasure and a lot of strength." The little objects
she introduced in to the landscape cen tered the sites: "Poetry inhabits certain
places where the cliffs need only a signal to bring them alive. Two or three lines,
a mark, and silence begins to speak."
Some of the precarios motifs were echoed i n abstract paintings, executed while
she was still a teenager. But in 1970-71, Vicuna chose for her mature work on

8
 Spinning the Common Thread

...

A Dimy of Objects (for the Resistance), London, J 973.

canvas a "naive" and visionary style, in homage to "the marginal people-chil­

dren, the insane, the uneducated. I t was the continuation of colonial images of
saints painted by mestizos-a Spanish tradition with an American touch that per­
mitted insights into the syncretic culture of Latin America today. " Although these
works were shown in museums and nati onally praised, they were also controver­
sial. She painted a menstruating angel; a "history painting" of Fidel Castro, part­
ly nude, greeted by Allende with a b u tterfly landing on his hand; Violeta Parra
with her body cut in three pieces; the heroes of the revolution in a style combin­
ing colonial santos and popular cartoons; and Lenin standing in an icy surrealist
landscape with a female bird carrying the good news that, in Lenin's words, "the
liberation of the proletariat will never be complete until liberation of women is
complete." She was to return to this style for a while in Bogota, painting from
popular songs and creating contemporary saints and mythical scenes, including
La Vicuna Andean Animal, a nude self-portrait in which she is embracing her
namesake, who shares an eye with the artist.
The ephemeral precarios, however, were more appropriate reflections of her
uprooted life in London. For a year, 1972-73, Vicuna made, and th en exhibited,
a "Diary of Objects" intended "to support the Chilean revolution and stop the
conspiracy against it." The four-hundred objec ts, she wrote, "try to kill three birds
with one stone . Politically, they stand for socialism, magically they help the lib­
eration struggle, and esthetically they are as beautifu l as they can be to recom­
fort the soul and give strength . ".

9
Lucy R. Lippard

The precarios are visual poems, "metaphors in space." Scraps of stone, wood,
feathers, shells, cloth, and other human-made detritus are gently juxtaposed.
They are often shades of white, gray, black, brown, bound perhaps with bright­
colored thread-very pure, clean, washed by the weather. Their "fastening" is so
loose, so flexible, that the parts seem to have blown together into a whole that
might metamorphose at any moment into another. "Precarious is what is o�taincd
by prayer," Vicuna has written. "Uncertain, exposed to hazards, insecure. From
the Latin precarittS, from precis; prayer." The word oir (to hear} was originally the
same as the word orar (to pray). "Reciprocity. By praying you reconnect ."

And if I devoted my life Y si yo dedicara mi vida

to one of its feathers? a una de sus plumas
To experience its nature a vivir su naturaleza
permeate and understand it serla y comprenderla
until the end? hasta elfin?

And if I arrived in a time y llegar a una epoca

when my gestures en q�te mis gestos
have become the thousand minute wands son las mil varillas
of the feather fnfimas
and my silence de la pluma
the humming and buzzing y mi silencio
of the wind in the feather los Z14mbidos y susurros
and my softness del viento en la pluma
velveteen and silken J' mis pensamientos
as the feather veloces
and my thoughts ajustados y certeros
quick precise and certain como los no-pensamientos
as the non-thoughts de Ia pJ.uma.
of the feather?

In the Exit Art installation, she chose to weave the space in the gallery, begin­
ning with the origins of weaving, "which must have been done by women trying
to make nests, imitating the birds," and the origins of her own "weaving." If the
precarios are the common formal thread, the action of weaving itself is the esthet­
ic and spiritual thread that runs through all of Vicuna's cultural production. ("'n
the Andes, they say that to weave is to give light.") Textiles were frequently offer­
ings in pre-Columbian cultures. Miniature textiles are found in tombs, and in
Peru the most precious fabrics, which took months to execute, were burned in
ceremonies. Vicuna began her show with a transformative ritual. 'The weaver,"
she wrote in an Argentine magazine, "looks for a place (from the Latin loct4s,

10
 Spinning the C o m m o n Thread

probably associated with the sanskrit loka, world and light), a meetingplace
between above and below, a position."
The cross form that recurs in the sculptures stands for the act of weaving, the
unity of opposites, of horizontal and vertical, which in Andean religions repre­
sents fertility and the continuity of life. (This was the basis for El Ande Futuro,
an installation at the Berkeley Art Museum in 1992.) The cross might also be a
symbol of bicultural experience, paths that both meet and depart. Yarn comes
from the moon, and is associated with women. (One of the sculptures refers to
the yarn that adorns alpacas in a propitiary ritual for fertility of the herd.) In
sacred Quechua, the word for language is "thread"; the word for complex con­
versation is "embroidering."
Often the thread in Vicuna's work is combined with, or stands for, water. This
is an apt emblem for her art, which also has a certain fluidity, clarity, and fragili­
ty, as well as a sense of change. (A book of her poetry is titled Unravelling Words
and the Weaving of Water. ) "The water wants to be heard," she says. "Everything
is falling apart because of lack of connections. Weaving is the connection that is
missing, the connection between people and themselves, people and nature."
She knew that her exhibition would not be perceived as politically active,
"because it's too metaphorical, too subtle," depending on sensory memories lost
by city dwellers, and on culturally untranslatable ideas-"despised peasant ideas"
lying at the heart of centuries of resistance to colonialism. "And that is an
intensely political act, as I see it," she insists, quoting Jennifer Harbury: "If they
don't want to see me, it means they need to see me." She identifies with "the first
Western environmental movement-that of Saint Francis in the thirteenth cen­
tury, talking to the birds, to the sun as Brother Sun. We need to respond to the
environment the way i t responds to us. Everything we do mirrors and reflects us."
The prime connection between the urban or even planetary scale and these tiny
artworks is a spiritual/political one with the land, with nature, especially in terms
of what society has done to the waters, our precarious threads of life. Vicuna's
phrase "The water wants to be heard" was used in an environmental action for
the Mapocho River in Santiago, and adopted as a slogan by the Riverkeeper
movement on the Delaware River. This pleases her: 'To have the words talk back
to the water, as the water speaks to the word!"
Much of Vicuna's outdoor work has been done in or by waterways. The process
began in 1966, when she rearranged the refuse found on Con-c6n, a stony beach
in Chile where two waters met, a natural gathering place for wandering rubbish,
which she called her "mine." Beginning with sticks, stones, and feathers, later
she added plastic detritus, drawings on the sand, powdered pigments, and objects
made in the studio from beach finds, completing a cycle. In a high Andes stream
that becomes contaminated as it descends, she made an offering of woven, tan­
gled threads of yarn uniting rocks and water. (She has since recreated some of the

11
Lucy R. Lippard

sixties works.) In 1985, I watched Vicuna make Kijllu, a Quechua word for a
crack in the rocks symbolizing communication between worlds above and below.
She placed red pigment and driftwood around a large crack near the surf line on
Salter Island in Maine. Unbeknownst to Vicuna, red also suggested the "Red
Ochre People" who had once lived in the area; their burial places, with corpses
colored with ochre, were discovered when the color seeped up through the soil.
Another sequence of precarios is called "El Agua de Nueva York." Tiny struc­
tures were sent floating in city puddles, gutters, and rivers, especially the
Hudson, which is a few blocks from Vicuna's home. In one part, a little "raft"
joined the garbage and condoms-a new "Kontiki," joining cultures as it moved.
Part of the Exit Art exhibition took place "between the gallery and the river," in
the space inhabited by La Vicuna, calling attention to the circulation of water in
New York, the urban bloodstream. These works were not announced; people
could find them, step on them, take them home, ignore them. Vicuna says she is
amazed at how New Yorkers won't pick things up off the street, even valuable
things, and is curious about the fate of the precarios.
Installations on a large or public scale are not foreign to Vicuna. Jn a 1971 piece
called Otoiio she brought truckloads of dead leaves into the Museo Nacional de
Bellas Artes in Santiago. In Bogota she protested the distribution of contaminated
milk with \laso de leche, a delicate street action in which a glass of milk was spilled
when a red yarn around it was pulled from a distance, and a poem was written on
the sidewalk in front of the home of the liberator Simon Bolivar: 'The cow I is the
continent I whose milk (blood) I is spilt. I What are we doing I with life?" A series
called "Santo Pero No Tanto" (saintly, but not too much so) culminated in a seven­
meter "comic strip" drawn with colored chalks below the chapel of Christ of
Montserrat on a pilgrimage Sunday. It showed Christ resurrected again, coming off
the cross to join in the people's struggles for liberation. There is a ritual element in
all of these works, because "Weaving and crossing are healing processes."
There is a strong spiritual element in the process of making the precarios, which
begins in the recognition of worth in the lost or discarded. "I look at things back­
wards, as they are going to look when I a m gone," says Vicuna. "I have a very
intense feeling that what we do is already the remains of what we are doing. The
dead water, our poems. I try to bring an awareness of what we are leaving, so that
by picking up things I am conscious of what has been thrown away, bLtt is staying."
One of the precarios is called La Falda de La Momia (Skirt of the Mummy, actu­
ally an old skirt of her own that faded and looks like an archeological piece).
Another is The Tree of Life. Vicuna went into a New York gallery specializing in
pre-Columbian art and saw "a precarious object, exactly like mine, but recovered
from a tomb of 2,000 years ago. My hair stood on end. It's not a piece you can
see reproduced in books. It was a sort of tree of life, of wood, with pieces of tex­
tiles, pieces of feathers, shells, instruments, exactly the same conception."

12
 Sp i n n i n g the Common Thread

Stills from the lost documentary "Santo Pero No Tanto", Bogota, 1978.

Vicuna sees her second film, Paracas, as a visual and sound poem, one of a
three-part "Meditation on Weaving," with her book Palabm e Hilo (Word and
Thread), and the Exit Art exhibition. The film is based on a two-thousand-year­
old textile in the Brooklyn Museum, taken from the necropolis on the Paracas
peninsula in Peru. By recreating the mythical and daily lives of those who wove
the tapestry, they "seem to have created a portrait of themselves," in full regalia,
as they celebrate the harvest, a ritual still performed today.
Vicuna had color photographs taken of the ninety "characters" in this epic tapes­
try, selected thirty of them, and animated them in a three-dimensional stage-set
space, for which she made tiny ceramics, textiles, and objects. ("'t's not really ani­
mation in the traditional sense. They don't move their hands. They're not articu­
lated, they just pass by, and stop so you can see them. In reality they are woven
three-dimensionally, so they are themselves little sculptures.") Some of these crea­
tures are the sacred animals: the snow leopard (a Tibetan animal unknown to
Andean weavers, who were trying to picture jaguars they had never seen), which
Vicuna painted in the 1960s before she knew of these images, a jaguar from which
a dream arises, a jaguar shaman who shares his tongue with the animal, perhaps
as a way of assuming his prophetic powers, the power of the word.
Words are part of Vicuna's weaving vortex, as in spinning a tale or a poem or a
spell-pak!brarmas, or "word-weapons." Among the London precarios were tiny
books, with words developed as images, which she also placed on banners. One
from 1974 was Sud Ame Rica (South Soul Rich/South America). She has contin­
ued to dissect words, uncovering-their skeletons and renaming their components,
opening them up "so that their internal metaphors were exposed, so people would
see words not just as abstractions but as something very concrete." She has made
word/visual pieces of SurAmerican ("Love the Rich South; some people love it in
order to exploit it and others love it in order to defend or cherish it"); Sol-i-dar·-i­
dad (Give and give sun); parti-si-pasion (party yes, passion, o r "to share in suffer­
ing"); COMPArtir el paN de EROS (share the bread of eros, with the word com­
paneros, "comrades," at its center).

13
Lucy R. Lippard

This is also her method in the sculptural precarios. Sometimes they are very sim­
ple, haikus from nature, as in Treno, which is wood, bone, wood, bone, wood, bone,
wood. Sometimes the materials are put together only to transform into something
else-a boat, a web, a tree of life. Identifying with her materials and their histories
of freedom, use, or misery, Vicuna has sometimes called her works basu1·itas (1 ittle
garbages, or rubbish). She uses the word to mean "that which is abandoned.'There
is something sacred about something totally poor and totally denied," she says
(including the philosophical relevance of American Indian cultures that continue
to be neglected in Latin American intellectual circles). She is not alone in this. A
large number of artists (she cites Picasso, Mir6, and Schwitters to begin with) such
as Betye and Alison Saar, Jimmie Durham, David Hammons, and Kathy Va rgas,
among others, respect and rehabilitate in very different ways the discards of main­
stream society. In pre-Columbian America objects were deliberately broken as bur­
ial goods, and bits of rubbish were bmied in a Peruvian temple wall, as if, says
Vicuna, "the threads and discards of an older age were to increase the power of the
place." And several ecologically motivated artists-Mierle Laderman Ukeles,
Christy Rupp, and Betsy Damon in New York, Ciel Bergman in Santa Barbara,
Dominique Mazeaud in Santa Fe, Regina Vater years ago in Brazil-have been con­
cerned with rubbish, its sources, its disposal, and its meaning in the world.
Vicuna's use of the word "little garbages" is also a bitter comment on the way Latin
Americans are treated in the artworld. However, "this is not only what others do to
us," she says, "but what we are doing to ourselves by not recognizing our origins, our
Andean roots, our own culture, language, perceptions. I was a sixties kid. I came to
understand the old and silent mountain people around me through reading Taoism
and Buddhism at an early age." Later she heard about John Cage and the artists
around him, and later still found Basho's last poem, "which talks about basura":

hard going way worn

dreaming of waste after waste
going on and on.
(translated by Cid Corman, 1984)

Over the years, Vicuna has gradually found deep connections between Taoism
and "the incredible coherence" of Andean culture. (Although her family is
Spanish and Basque, Vicuna, who speaks with the high, wispy Andean voice, and
has apparently "Indian" features, identifies fully vvith indigenous Latin America,
especially the matrilineal Mapuche.) " I started calling myself an Andean ani­
mal-La Vicui'\a-in Colombia. When I got off the plane I threw myself down on
the soil; I couldn't believe the sensation of being in Latin America again. It was
far from Chile, but it was the same spine."
She recalls being in Buenos Aires in 1984, a terrible time for Chile, when
Pinochet was crushing the opposition under a "state of emergency" and it seemed

14
 Spinning the C o m m o n Thread

Palabrarmas, London, 1974.

nothing could be done. She began writing "a sort of call, El Llamado de Ia Vicuna,
and out of it came an image of a whole day of silence, a prayer," as a form of
bringing unity from chaos. Ten days after she wrote it, the Chilean opposition
made a similar call for a day of silence, fasting, sharing, meditation, and prayer,
which was observed nationwide, despite the ban on fliers or public announce­
ments. Following the "Defensa de Ia Vida" action two months earlier, this marked
the beginning of an explosion of resistance that resulted in the 1989 elections and
Pinochet's deposition as head of state.
All of the important ideas in the Andes, says Vicuna, are conceived in palin­
dromes, or pairs, like the ancient q uipu (one line, or horizon), with threads extend­
ing below (the amounts) and above (the summation). One mirrors the other. "A
circular thought finds reverberations in every aspect of life," she says. "For exam­
ple, you ask a weaver, when you spin yarn, why do you spin it in two. She replies,
'because everything needs to have a couple, a pair,' so it's the same concept of
union complementaria, complementary unity."
Reciprocity is the essential law of the ancient world. Vicuna sees all her work as a
response to her materials (and everything in life is material for art): 'These materials
are lying down and I respond by standing them up. The gods created us and we have
to respond to the gods. There will only be equality when there is reciprocity. The root
of the word respond is to offer again, to receive something and offer it back," as in
the Native American concepts of the "giveaway," "potlatch," and the "giveback,"
echoing the qu.ipu, the sky reflected in the lake. One of Vicuna's precarios is a bone,
a blue stick, and a spurt of grass from a sacred island on Lake Titicaca.

The Inca is about to be

and the ruins of the past
are the model for the future
being created by our
remembering.

All quotations arc from interviews with the author in 1985 and 1989, and from her book Precario!Precarhms.
For further information on Vicuna's paintings. see my essay 'The Vicuna and the Leopard," in Red Bass (1985).

15
The Shadcnv of a Loom, Hudson Street., New York, l993. Photo: Cesar Patemosto.
 OUVRAGE:
KNOT A NOT, NOTES AS KNOTS

M. Catherine de Zegher

C risscrossing the Antivero river a single white thread joins rocks and stones
under and over the clear water. In this remote place, high up in the Chilean
Andes, Cecilia Vicuna-an artist and a poet-is tracing the fragrance of the iiipa
leaves and tying one verdant side of the river to the other with cord. Flexible,
straight, and light, the line that she draws is a visible act. When suddenly two
boys come up the river, jumping from stone to stone, they watch her carefully
dropping lines inside the water. Without saying a word they slowly approach clos­
er and closer in the prints of her hands. While Vicuna is securing the yarn as into
a warp-the loom of the Antivero: the river is the warp, the crossing threads are
the weft-their curiosity turns into interest. Sitting on a rock they observe her
gestures/signs and finally ask her what it is. When she returns them the question,
the boys reply that they do not know, but that they would like very much to get
the string. With a laugh Vicuna grants their request and immediately they start to
untie all the rocks and plants, gradually dissolving the spatialized drawing or geo­
metric pattern of woven lines into the current.

A Drawn Game. To the boys the line is a valuable length of cord used with or
without a rod for catching fish. To Vicuna, the line-as a cord and as a single row
of words in a poem-is a trail of communication, and the gift is the completion
of the circle, in which the process of forming through disappearance is taken up
again in the flow of events. Perhaps to some the line is a contour of an overtly
romantic and idealistic story about "nomad space," because it blurs the border-

17
M. Catherine de Zegher

' , -. � ,. < .- •

.,
- ----- 0

String Figures by Harry Smith. Photo: Cesar Patemosto. Special thanlts to john Cohen.

line between the "real" and the "imaginary," between art and life-the object con­
sumed in the act; because it circumscribes and "protects" the mountain water as
a source of life before contamination; because it alludes to joy, play and ramble;
because it refers to the whole meaning in the action-even more, to the perpet­
ual motion of "doing" and "undoing" in weaving as in language; and because it
recovers in a distant past our sensory memory of a children's game at school:
"eat's cradle."
Played by two or more persons, eat's cradle is a game of making geometrical
string figures, looped over the fingers and stretched between the two hands. The
figures change as the string is passed from one person to another. Of the games
people play, string figures enjoy the reputation of having been the most widespread
form of amusement in the world. Over two-thousand individual patterns have
been recorded worldwide since 1888, when anthropologist Franz Boas first
described a pair of Eskimo string figures. ' "The popularity of string figures derived
from the novelty of being able to construct highly complex designs instantaneous­
ly in a reproducible fashion using rea d ily available materials such as plant fibers,
leather thongs , or even plaited human hair."2 Moreover, hundreds of individual
patterns can be generated from the same loop of string. Unfortunately, string fig­
ures disappeared rapidly in regions heavily influenced by European culture. Often
missionaries discouraged the making of string figures because of their frequent
association with pagan myths or depiction of sexual acts_�
As if speaking and listening to each other with the fingers alte rnately restricted
and free, the players seek not only to take over the string , but also to recast the
pattern without losing the thread. Drawing patterns of construction/dissolution,
eat's cradle is a play of beginnings, an interplay between the new and the cus­
tomary without which a beginning cannot take place: an "intertext." Similarly, in
Vicuna's work Antivero (1981), the two rocky banks of the river can be consid­
ered two hands, where the intertwined thread seems to function as the cradle
and the communication, as the "nest" and the "text. " Etymologically "nest"
derives from "net,"' an open-meshed fabric of cord, hair, or twine used for pro­
tecting, confining or carrying. A meshwork relates to a framework of interwoven
flexible sticks and twigs used to make walls, fences, and roofs in which to rear
the young. To give birth and to protect the li neage , women needed to weave nests
into wattle-and-daub shelters.

18
 Ouvrage: Knot a Not, N o t e s as Knots

A Point between Lines. Although we can n o longer recapture details of prehis­

toric women's lives, it seems that weaving has always been associated with car­
ing: child care and food preparation. In Note on the Division of Labor by Sex
Judith Brown states that whether or not the community relies upon women as the
chief providers of a given type of labor depends upon "the compatibility of this
pursuit with the demands of child care."; This is particularly the case for the
crafts of spinning, weaving, and sewing: "repetitive, easy to pick up at any point,
reasonably child-safe, and easily done at home. "6 Still, Brown notes "that this par­
ticular division of labor revolves around reliance, not around ability, within a com­
munity in which specialization was desirable." Being perishable, the textiles
themselves at best only provide fragmentary evidence about women's lives, but
materials and metaphors of weaving do inform, since they permeate both: child­
bearing and food. "Weaving (resulting in cloth) and p arturi tion' (resulting in
babies) both display women's generative capability. Tzutujil l\ll aya use anatomical
terms for loom parts (i.e., head, bottom, ribs, heart, umbilical cord), indicating
that weaving is considered equivalent to giving birth. Midwives in Santiago
AtitHtn bind a pregnant woman's belly with the long hair ribbons that Atiteco
women wind around their heads. These mimetically regulate the uterus's snake­
like coils to correctly position the baby for delivery. fn Chenalho, fine huipiles8
are thrown into the nearby lake when women dream that the Virgin Mary needs
this nourishment. "9 According to Vicuna, caring and weaving fuse in naming: to
care, to carry, to bear children, to bear a name.10
In South America the name Quechua synthesizes well this relation between
text, textile, and the notion of survival in collaboration. The word designates a
member of a group of Inca tribes and also the language of these tribes, still spo­
ken among 4,000,000 Indians of Peru, Ecuador, Bolivia, and Argentina.
Etymologically Quechua not only means the twine of two (or more) strands twist­
ed together, but also the interlacement of two persons copulating. Significantly,
in the Andes the more meanings (double, triple . . . ) a word has, the higher its
value in the hierarchy of words: it belongs then to the Hatunsimi, 11 which means
"important language." Vicuna points out that language is inherited from the dead
and yet again and again it is "recovered"-meaning to regain control, to repos­
sess, to create again, or to conceal again-by the living. So words are simultane­
ously old and new. Their universe is "version"-in the sense of transformation­
and version indicates passage, direction, action, movement.
Still, in a recent thread piece, La bodega negra (Barn Yarn, 1994), which was
made in an old barn in the region of Vicuna's childhood near San Fernando
(Chile), it is clear that the "directional" remains an important issue of her work.
When the artist catches the intense sunrays inside the dilapidated barn piercing
the roofholes and producing starlike points on the stone walls, earthen floor,
plough share, harrow, sacks, crops, and fodder, once again dispersal and inversion

19
M . Catherine de Z eg her

take place. Dazzled when entering the barn, the viewer experiences the exterior
brightness of the day turning into the interior obscurity of the night. As blind
spots the constellations are cast down to earth. On her arm Vicuna is seizing a
(circular) point, another one, and another, and one more: the Southern Cross.
She has fastened across the space, from stones in the wall to stones on the floor,
threads that, as the extension of her body, momentarily hold the suspending light.
In the desire to map, this microcosmos provides protection and offers "abstract­
ed points of identification with the human body. "12 As Henri Michaux writes in
Beginnings: "Hands off in the distance, still farther off, as far away as possible,
stiff, outspread fingers, at the self's outer limits, fingers . Surface without
mass, a simple thread encompassing a void-being, a bodiless body."" Later in the
evening, inversely, when the sun is setting and the angle of light is changing, the
stars in the barn disappear in the twilight to reappear in the night sky. "Space is
now time ceaselessly metamorphosed through action.""
Besides the use of roof holes by the French Revolutionary architect Etienne­
Louis Boullee in his domed Cenotaph dedicated to Newton, another more recent
example comes to mind in the Sun Tunnels of Nancy Holt. During the early sev­
enties Nancy Holt concentrated on urban or landscape spaces as seen through
holes in tunnels, pipes, and other devices that made the viewer consider both
outside and inside, perceptual and physiological sensations.15 The difference is
that the tubular conduits were perforated on purpose as well as oriented in a very
specific area by the artist. If land art claims to be concerned with nature as the
incontestable provider of ideas and with light as the constitutive element in art
and architecture, Vicuna's work introduces a different way of marking, one that
addresses nature and (agri)culture in a dialogic way. La bodega negra is respond­
ing to a sign, it is not imposing a mark. Being a "non-site" piece, it is not about
appearance, but about disappearance.

Odds and Ends. Cons idering the linguistic relation of text, textile, and architec­
ture, it seems appropriate to introduce the French word ouvrage to describe
Vicuna's art practice as an open-ended work, an ongoing practice with links to
writing, weaving, and constructing. Since January 1966, when Cecilia Vicuna
made her first outdoor piece Con-c6n on the beach at the junction of two waters,
the Aconcagua River and the Pacific Ocean in Chile, she has examined tran­
sience and has named her work "precario." "Precarious is what is obtained by
prayer. Uncertain, exposed to hazards, insecure. From the Latin precarius, from
precis, prayer." '6 "Prayer" understood not as a request, but as a response, is a dia­
logue or a speech that addresses what is (physically) "there" as well as what is
"not there," the place as well as the "no place," the site as well as the "non-site."
Prayer is dialogue as a form of transition from what is to what could be.
"Sacrifice" is an act-made-sacred and transcendent by the awareness that this act

20
 Ouvrag e : Knot a N o t , N o t e s a s Knots

is not only physical but retains another dimension and thus has a double mean­
ing, is ambiguous. Vicui ia quotes from a Vedic text: "the first sacrifice is 'seeing,'
because the act of seeing is a response." The root of the word respond is "to ded­
icate again," to receive something and to donate it back. More or less about the
same time, Lygia Clark was writing: "Art is not bourgeois mystification. What has
changed is the form of communicating the proposition. It's you who now give
expression to my thoughts, to draw from them whatever vital experience you want
. . . This feeling of totality captured within the act should be encountered with
joy, in order to learn how to live on the ground of precariousness. This feeling of
the precarious must be absorbed for one to discover in the immanence of the act
the meaning of existence."17
Born of contemplation and made of refuse, Vicuna's earth works are an answer
to the land and the sun, to the lost feathers and accumulated objects. Many times
she has used a stick to comb the beach into lines, circles, and spirals. Gathering
flotsam and jetsam, she recognizes the inherent value of discarded materials that
are lying down, and stands them up. Her desire to order things is a kind of reponse
to their language: garbage/language, in the sense that garbage has a signifying
potention and impulse that give new tension to the signifier. But whatever order
she has created,18 the wind scauers it, and long waves rolling up onto the sand­
also called beachcombers-erase her work Con-con at high tide. Thus, since the
mid-1960s Vicuna has been producing precarios, which consist of small, multi­
colored assemblages of found materials such as fragments of driftwood, feathers,
stones, lumps of shredded plastic, herbs, thin sticks, electric wire, shells, bones,
and thread. Each piece is composed i.n such a way that every material holds anoth­
er in balance. And, although not featuring any symmetry, each whole structure
stands up in a fragile state of suspended equilibrium. Vicuna says of her basuritas:
"'We are made of throwaways and we will be thrown away,' say the objects. Twice
precarious they come from prayer and predict their own destruction. Precarious in
hisLory they will leave no trace. The history of art written in the North includes
nothing of the South. Thus they speak in prayer, precariously."
Read in comparison with the land art of Nancy Holt or Richard Long, Cecilia
Vicuna's earth works differ not only in their relationship to the environment and
the body, but also in their diffusion of knowledge. In contradistinction to
Vicuna's perception, these artists have staged a landscape for the viewer to colo­
nize in order to aggrandize the self and to summon awe for the sublime Other, as
a reason for obliterating it.'9 "In Richard Long's work the body is absent, though
implied there is in fact a disembodied consciousness, a romantic primitivist fan­
tasy of virgin nature projected no matter where in the world by an observing eye
enjoying a sovereign isolation: residues of the colonial mind-set."2<.1 Again, in the
case of Vicuna, the earth work is not about appearance, but about disappearance.
And in Chile the desaparecidos (the disappeared ones) of the Junta during the

21
M. C a t h e r i n e de Z eg he r

seventies have a body.21 For this reason Vicuna drew, on her first return from exile
to Chile, the work Ttr.nquen ( 1 9 8 1 ) on the sand with colors of pigment featuring
the encounter of sun and bone, life and death.22

By Name. From 1966 to 1972 Cecilia Vicuna often practiced her work in the
streets of Santiago de Chile, where she created various unannounced perfor­
mances and events. In 1971 she had her first solo exhibition at the National
Museum of Fine Arts in Santiago with the work Oto1io (Autumn), for which she
filled the main room with autumn leaves three feet deep. In 1972 she traveled to
London with a fellowship for postgraduate study at the Slade Schoo] of Fine Arts;
in 1973 she had an exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art. When the mil­
itary coup occurred in 1973 and President Allende died, Vicuna decided not to
return to her countty and remained in exile in Great Britain. She became a polit­
ical activist and founded, together with Guy Brett, David Medalla, and John
Dugger, the organization Artists for Democracy to oppose the militaty dictatorship
in Chile. The ideas formulated by Artists for Democracy were linked to Vicuna's
first revolutionary group action in 1967: the formation of the Tribu No (the No
Tribe), which issued manifestos and staged public interventions. Having read the
creationist manifestos of Huidobro, the futurists, and the surrealists, she believed
that the only contribution of the inhabitants of the Southern Hemisphere in the
second part of the twentieth century was to say "no," as proclaimed in the "No­
manifesto," which circulated as a manuscript from hand to hand (Santiago de
Chile, 1967). The "No-manifesto" was attended with actions such as installing the
Banco de Ideas (for Allende), putting the question of "what is poetry to you?" over
the telephone, ci rculating "circular" letters, composing a dictionary of piropos e
insultos (sexist words and insults) and an enclocepedia del asco (encyclopedia of

22
 Ouvrage: Knot a N o t , Notes a s Knots

Left :
D01ia Elba Castillo de Torres,
San Fernando, 1994.
Photo: Cesar Paternosto.

1\llap..che B11shet Weaver,

n/d circa 1972, Chile.

Ilia/eta Parra, nld, Chile.

disgust). At the same time the art, poetry, and music of Violeta Parra have greatly
influenced Vicuna's ideas. Violeta Parra (1917-67) was a Chilean peasant woman,
whose research on the weaving, oral poetry, and music of Chile, as well as her own
work, formed the foundations of the movement called La Nueva Cancion
Chilena. Political and contemporary in its focus, it retained at the same time the
ancient mestizo rhythms of traditional music and electrified all of South America.
Confronted with a sense of loss and isolation, Cecilia Vicuna left London in
1975 and returned to South America. She went to Bogota, where for several
months she continued to make banners and sets for revolutionary theater com­
panies such as Teatro La Candelaria. She lectured throughout Colombia about
the "Chilean Struggle for Liberation," made a film at a bus stop near a fabrica de
santitos, and made a living reading succesfully her own "erotic" poetry. During
this period, Vicuna stunned people with her performance of a spilled glass of
milk, Vaso de leche (Glass of Milk, 1979). When it was estimated that every year
1,920 children in Bogota died from drinking contaminated milk produced in
Colombia, and the government neither prosecuted the distributors nor took any
action to stop the "milk crime," Vicuna decided to announce and perform the
spilling of a glass of milk in front of a government building under a blue sky. She
attached a short cord around the glass of milk, pulled it over, and thus "the poem
was written on the pavement." About this performance Leon Golub once said

23
M . Catherine d e Zegher

that it was the most efficacious political work: inversely proportional to its small
size and precarious content, the act had a powerful and complex impact.
In Vicuna's artistic practice, and particularly as i t relates to political protest,
the investigation of language and the politics of definition are always at stake,
because for her "naming" is the most political act of all. A;te precario is the name
she gives to her independent voice within the Southern Hemisphere, chall�nging
her colonized position. Her art is Andean, it is not about Andean art. It belongs
to this urban mestizo culture and not to the Western purist version of it appro­
priating "the little lama." Her work concerns la batalla de los significados (the bat­
tle of the signifieds). According to Vicuna, submission and poverty begin with the
acceptance of definitions that others create for you. When one general designa­
tion of "indian"-at first a mistaken definition by the conquistadores-covered
the othering of all tribes, the massacre of the native populations of the Americas
was made possible. Recognition needs a name, one's own name.

Notes as Snot. Small objects, much like Vicllli\a's precarios, consisting of branches
and cords, as well as string figures, have appeared in many cultures as depictions
of the natural environment, the material culture (tools, food, clothing sources,
food gathering, and other daily activities ), interpersonal relationships, legends . .
. 23 Oftentimes chants and stories were reci ted as a string figure was displayed.
Kathleen Haddon suggests that string fig ure s merely served as a ready means of
illustration for the objects or beings portrayed in the accompanying legend. The
illustration was readily p repared in the absence of drawing materials, was highly
rep roducible, and was not dependent on the maker's artistic ability.24 Being a sort
of cultural archive, a repository for beliefs and observations deemed worthy of
preserving, the objects and the stories attached to them served not only to locate
peo p le with reference to the constellation of celestial objects but also within a
kinship system. Claude Levi-Strauss states that ''like phonemes, kinship terms
are elements of meaning; like phonemes, they acquire meaning only if they are
i n tegrated into systems. 'Kinship systems', like 'phonemic systems', are built by
the mind on the level of unconscious thought. "2'
Key elements in Vicuna's work are: star and stone, warp and word, which she
defines as points of exact observation (i.e., a tall stone-for example a menhir­
in a vast area indicates a fixed place from which to observe the earth and the sky;
a constellation indicates a reference in the universe; etc.) constructed within
models outside the self such as: constellations, weavings, and language.
Moreover, although these "structured sets" or models are permanent and account
for various aspects of empirical social reality, they possess an inner movement
(i.e., the celestial course, the weaving grid, the alphabet), and thus call forth
responses from the viewer/reader. A warp is many threads, a word is many
sounds, many ideas.26 The strangeness or otherness of the self occurs as soon as

24
 Ouvrage: Knot a N o t , N o t e s as Knots

it is constructed, that is, as soon as it is symbolized; thus these structures, simul­

taneously constitutive and alien, are vehicles to define the self-and are thus a
means of empowerment.
Any act of symbolization is both a loss and a formation of the self and its real­
ity and should therefore remain a coming-into-language, a continuous process of
defining, open to shifts i n its mapping. Star, stone, warp, word: each of these
points gives rise to inner movement and ambiguity and should be used only as a
reference for movement within the unlimited. Motion avoids the petrifying effect
implicit in the fixed gaze. Everything in Vicuna's work is about connecting, weav­
ing, studying the relations of lines to points and references. However, once these
points and references are fixed, "immovability within movement is created and
along with it the Illusion of Order and Time." Cecilia Vicuna writes in May 197 3 :
In thinking o f the form for which I am looking I can't help but find other forms for things
outside my paintings. for any search must associate and connect "'rith the search for a
social way. If not, it is a castrated search, an apolitical occupation good for nothing, or good
to help maintain the present structures which have been established for the benefit of the
few and the destruction of the rest. But now these structures must be established taking
imo consideration facts other than profit or power. lt will be possible to simplify these facts
to these three categories: the way in and out of air, of food, of semen in the body''

In this sense Vicuna proclaims "laws" as necessary, but movable and directional,
written for the benefit of what goes in and out of the body: breath, snot, semen,
urine, excrement, babies.

Star, Stone, Stomach. Vicuna's working field consists of the exploration of the
symbolic function of weaving and language, stressing the fundamental place of
textiles in the Andean system of knowledge. Affirming a basic congruence among
the realms of writing, agriculture and weaving, the opening lines of the Popol Vuh
(the Quiche Maya's ancient sacred text) have two possible translations: "This is
the beginning of the Ancient Word, here in this place called Quiche. Here we
shall inscribe, we shall implant the Ancient Word"; or "Here we shall design, we
shall brocade the Ancient Word. "28 This multivocal translation suggests that the
Maya recognize these three realms as diverse yet congruent paths of knowledge.
The concept of intertextuality, linking the arts of music, weaving, oratory, archi­
tecture, and agriculture, gives insight into the permeability of the boundaries
between different domains of knowledge.29 If it seems, as Claude Levi-Strauss
\:vrites, that the unconscious activity of the mind consists i n imposing forms upon
content, and if these forms are fundamentally the same for all minds-ancient
and modern, primitive and civilized (as the study of the symbolic function,
expressed in language, so strikingly indicates)-then a single structural scheme
exists behind the chaos of rules and customs and operates in different spatial and
temporal contexts.Jo Grasping in word and thread-palahra e hilo-the uncon-

25
M . C a t heri n e de Zegher

scious structure underlying each social institution, Cecilia Vicuna offers a prin­
ciple of interpretation accurate for other institutions or systems of representa­
tion. I return to the issue of this rather totalizing thought and address the prob­
lem of it further on.
Most valued and respected products in Andean culture are textiles/1 which con­
struct and carry or, rather, are meaning and identification. Technically, a wov�n fab­
ric consists of two elements with different functions: the fixed vertical threads
(warp) and the mobile horizontal threads (weft or woof), which intersect the fixed
threads perpendicularly and pass above them. Stake and thread, warp and woof
have been analyzed in basketry and weaving as figures of "supple solids."�2
Determined by the loom (the frame of the warp), the textile can be infinite in length
but not in width, where it is closed by a back and forth motion. Warp-patterned
weaving, characteristic of all remaining Andean weaving today, was slow to be rec­
ognized as having value for studies of gender, social identity, economic networks,
and modernization. As a strong indicator of cultural patterns-what the Maya of
Mexico and Guatemala call costumbre-textile has communicative, but also poetic,
economic, ritual, and political power. Weaving is meaning in multiple ways.

Word and Thread. Compared to the privileged status given to painting, sculpture,
and architecture, textile arts have been virtually ignored. Following the Bauhaus,
the distinction and interrelationship of design and art were greatly elaborated in
the work of Anni Albers. She overcame "two fallacious premises: that designing
and making art are conflicting occupations; and that work in the fiber medium is
categorically craft and not art."» Exploring the randomness of a discarded string in
Knot II (l94 7), Albers said that, "although it is small, each thread seems charged
with uninterrupted energy: the underlying units twine and intertwine with nonstop
vitality, as if to say that they exist singly but also as part of something greater. "·14
Working with material "is a listening for the dictation of the material and a taking
in of the laws of harmony. It is for this reason that we can find certitude in the
belief that we are taking part in an eternal order." Albers also came to appreciate
the challenge of the discipline of weaving. Unlike painting, which allowed limit­
less freedom, the inherent properties of textiles (its tactile gualities, material com­
binations, and so forth) and the specific laws of their production (the grid) provid­
ed a framework that Albers found stimulating rather than restrictive.15
In the late 1920s and 1930s, Anni Albers introduced cellophane and other syn­
thetics, as well as plastic and metallic threads that added luster and color to her
weavings but were also light reflective and dust and water repellent. Taking these
materials further than anyone else at that time, as Mary Jane Jacobs argues,
Albers also revived long-forgotten methods, particularly those used in Peruvian
textiles, which she studied and collected. The ancient Peruvians employed
almost all known hand methods and their work constitutes perhaps the richest

26
 Ouvrage: K n o t a Not, Notes as Knots

body of textile art by any culture in the world. Albers praised the Peruvians'
adventurous use of threads and commented on their "surprising and ingenious
ways of varying in inventiveness from piece to piece."36 Mostly overlooked by the
artworlcl, Andean textile arts also eloquently express transmutation of culture,
women's concerns with indigenous and nonindigenous traditions, and intercul­
tural exchanges. Cecilia Vicuna, using thread and cloth as her main medium, pro­
poses weaving as a form of participation issuing from popular culture, but she has
always perceived and understood weaving as an alternative discourse and a
dynamic model of resistance (as do most indigenous Latin American women).
Janet Catherine Berlo points out "that all of the cultural cross-currents and over­
laps in textile art of Latin America are not, however, simply a 'making do'. They
are not merely a passive, defensive response to five centuries of colonialism " I n
"Beyond Bricolage" she argues that "the improvisations and appropriations in
women's textiles are deliberate and sometimes culturally subversive." Although
world-famous as tourist items, their fabrics are signs of renewal, of new forms
and topical themes, coming direc tly from the people. Although both women and
textiles are crucial to the study of postcolonial representation, Western biases
have until recently viewed women's textiles as 'sub-Primitive' art.
Using examples from two groups, the Kuna and the Maya, Janet Catherine
Serlo shows that
. . . cloth makes manifest deeply held cultural values that may otherwise be imperceptible.
In fact, it may be women's very crucial job to translate these ephemeral values into mate·
rial objects. Jn a number of Amerindian societies, men's arts arc oral while women's are,
literally, material: men speak, women make cloth. Hierarchical codes within our own word­
obsessed culture dictate that the public, the verbal, is the area of status, autonomy, impor­
tance. But this i s not so clear within the indigenous systems. The most clear-cut dichoto­
my between the expressive roles of men and those of women occurs among the Kuna
Indians of Panama " Two types of communal gatherings, or congresos, are a vital part of
Kuna life. At secular gatherings men gain status and prestige through public displays of
their verbal fluency. Only the most eloquent men rise to positions as village chiefs who
conduct sacred gatherings attend�d by both men and women. In this forum, chiefs display
their consummate verbal s ki ll s through chanted dialogues that cover sacred history, poli­
tics, and a host of traditions. The Kuna sacred gathering encapsulates the aesthetic ideals
of the Kuna universe: the chiefs, arrayed at the center of the gathering house, engage i n
verbal discourse. They are surrounded by rows of women, dressed in their finest garments,
who work on textiles while the chiefs chant. Around the outside of the circle, sit the rest
of the men."'

Mary W. Helms observes that "by long and arduous hours of mola39 production,
by the display created by mola wearing, and perhaps in the symbolism contained
in mola designs, they assist the community in the furtherance of these ends by
creating a form of 'silent oratory' that publicly expresses, with form and vibrant
color, the same views of the 'world-as-event' and the same concepts of group

27
M. Catherine de Ze gh er

cohesion and morality as are proclaimed by the spoken oratory of the men."•o
There is some evidence that a similar pattern of men's verbal and women's visu­
al modes of expression occurs among the highland Maya. Male members of the
native religious hierarchy use a style of speech in which repetition, metaphor, and
patterns of parallel syntax are common. The fine nuances, repetitions, and
rhythmic yet asymmetrical color and design patterns characteristic of1 Maya
women's backstrap-loomed textiles serve in the female arena as the equivalent of
Maya men's complex verbal play.'' In her per(ormances, Vicuna speaks while she
weaves, and weaves while she sings.

Mistresses of the Needle.41 It seems that even in an excluding patriarchal cul­

ture, spaces of intervention exist where suppressed voices not only articulate
their experiences and self-defined positions, but where they also express their
participation in culture as active agents of transformation. The techniques of
weaving allow a mobility of doing and undoing within the accumulative medium
of textiles (adding brocade, embroidery, trim, and applique), thus increasing the
meaning, power, value, and visual display. Women in Latin America transform
alien objects, influences, materials, and ideas in purposeful collages, as they
adopt multivocal aesthetics to indigenous culture. From this point of view textiles
can be read as active texts that play out the ongoing intercultural dialogue of self­
determination and cultural hegemony, as well as the dialogue of exchange
between conservatism and innovation, continuity and transmutation •.. In the
material realm, Latin American women confront otherness-whether as a result
of remoteness of time (colonialism) or remoteness of space (first world)-by cre­
ating a vision of indigenous culture that balances both and at the same time
demonstrates its durability through the strength and vitality of their fabric. "This
is a subversive act for it co-opts the hegemonic tradition that views the third
world as a dumping ground for its products."«
Considering the work of Cecilia Vicui'ia, it becomes clear how actively she par­
ticipates in defining culture and the social fabric of language by disrupting the
grammar imposed by figures of authority and by recovering the texture of commu­
nication. Vicuna's strategies of purposeful improvisation, thoughtful linguistics,
and accumulation allow her to express a multilevelled and referential body of
meanings and to display this in numerous spheres of action. During the sixties,
when she daily rode buses in the capital of Santiago, she decided to wear a differ­
ent woven invention as a multicolored glove over her hand every day. For weeks she
manufactured many types of sometimes funny gloves in all colors and forms. As an
operator of signs, she wanted these handfuls of threads to function as a surprise,
new-"as art"-each time she took the bus and raised her hand to reach for a hand
grip. Her use of the body as a material for performance art inscribed itself in the
city and its human movements. For both the artist and the "person in society" a

28
 Ouvrage: Knot a Not, N o t e s a s Knots

Hilo en el cerro, Santa Lucfa

Ridge at Santiago, I 994.
Photo: M. Catherine de Zegher.

liberating force was implicated in the awakening of each of one's gestures. Turning
the familiar material (a glove) and daily gesture (reaching for the handgrip) into a
question mark, she exposed the passengers' quiescent habits and tried to intensi­
fy the desire and capacity to reformulate models of signification.
Vicuna's bus performance, El guante (The Glove), was prompted by the neces­
sity to restructure the language of creativity, so that the artwork could remain a
means of opposing authority (be it mil itary or multinational) and its concepts of
meaning. Art here was a tool to retain indepe ndence and to nourish resistance.
On the one hand, her action seems to relate to the earlier dissatisfaction of rebel­
lious young poets, writers, and painters in South America-such as Viol eta Parra,
Jorge Luis Borges, Xul Solar, and the manifesto -iss uing vanguardistas45-with the
prevailing norm of Spanish literary language as a system of repressive and dead­
ening constraints. For them, "a model of a perpetually reinvented language , con­
stantly shifting to accommodate new concepts and information, was close at
hand-again, in the streets of Buenos Aires, where Argentines daily enriched the
staid speech of Castille with Italianisms, fragments of German and English, and
their own surprising coinages. "'6 On t he other hand, Vicuna's glove performance
seem s to retrace an ancient Mapuche practice in Chile, where an old myth tells
that the Mapuche women learned how to weave from observing spiders at work
and from contemplating their cobwebs (both nests and traps) . vVhen a baby girl
is born, mothers walk out to catch a spider and let it walk on the baby's hand: the
movements of the spider will stick to her hands, and the spider will teach her.

El Mi ra r Cruzado:' More recently, in 1994, two outdoor works in Chile reframe

Vicuna's concern with cro ssing the boundaries that separate the indivi dual and the
collective, the private and the public, the local and the global, the "smooth" and the

29
M . Catherine de Zegher

"striated," the "nomad space" and the "sedentary space."•R For Hilo en el cerro
(Thread in the Ridge) at Cerro Santa Lucia i n the public park, the trysting place of
lovers and others in the center of Santiago, she wove with a ball of red yarn spun in
the house of a lVlapuche woman. Was she using the thread in order to find her way
out of the labyrinthine garden, or to enweb the little mountain? Does the red string
indicate the solution of a problem or does it entail a question? Her 12 Hil.o� en un
corral (The Corral Grid) was made in the corral of a farm in the mountains near San
Fernando. The corral is a trapezoidal space created by stone walls (una pirb} for
the mestizo purpose of domesticating horses. Always falling apart, the pirlw is peri·
odically repaired with new stones, which are added to the ancient ones in an ongo­
ing process. Inside the irregular corral, Vicuna's woven striation was suspended in
midair at wall height. Emphasizing the spatial "imperfection" of the corral, the
weaving is an open work for the viewer to enter, by sliding one's head in to look at
it. Essential in both weavings is the crossing of threads, the crossing of straightened
lines at right angles, the intercrossing of opposed forces, the intertexture. Vicuna's
art exists at the cru:x:, where fertility sprouts and change or transformation happens
through the encounter. However, while the former weaving consists of her usual
unrolled woolen lines revealing an optional trajectoty between trees and flowers,
local linkages between parts, and multiple orientation or constant change in direc­
tion, the latter weaving represents a most regular grid structure.
J n principle, a fabric has a certain number of characteristics that define it as a
striated space. However, it seems that this conventional view of weaving should
be suspended so as to observe some specific processes. For example, felt is a sup·
ple, solid material that has an altogether different effect; it is "an antifabric "
Since it involves no separation of threads, no intertwining, but is only an entan·
glement of fibers obtained by fulling, it constitutes a smooth space '9 Like paper,
felt uses a matrix without entering it. But, according to Gilles Deleuze and Felix
Guattari, striated space is not simply opposed to or different from smooth space.
Although there is a distinction between the two, in fact they only exist in mixture
and in passages from one to another. In this sense, and conversely to one's expec­
tation about the striated nature of fabric, most of Vicuna's weavings seem to
belong to smooth space, where variation and development of form are continu­
ous and unlimited, where the lines go in all directions, where "the stop follows
from the trajectory." To quote Deleuze and Guattari: "Smooth space is direction­
al rather than dimensional or metric. Smooth space is filled by events or haec­
ceities, far more than by formed and perceived things. I t is a space of affects,
more than one of properties. It is haptic;o rather than optical perception. Whereas
in the striated forms organize a matter, in the smooth materials signal forces and
serve as symptoms for them. It is an intensive rather than extensive space, one of
distances, not of measures and properties.";' Vicuna's sites (sand beaches, sea
and river, streets, etc.} and works-be it in Chile, Bogota or New York-are "local

30
 Ouvrage: Knot a N o t , Notes a s Knots

spaces of pure connection."�2 Her linkages, signals, and orientations change

according to temporary vegetation, occupations, and precipitation. The abstract
line that she draws is "a line of flight without beginning or end, a line of variable
direction that describes no contour and delimits no form ."�1
Yet, Vicuna's two recent outdoor weavings, Hilo en el cerro and 12 Hilos en un
corral, seem to enact, respectively, smooth space and striated space and, almost
literally, the crossings and passages between both spaces, as though one emanat­
ed from the other, "but not without a correlation between the two, a recapitula­
tion of one in the other, a furtherance of one through the other."�' Her unexpect­
ed use of the woven grid in the corral piece visualizes the striation of space as a
way to subordinate and measure it within anxiety in the face of all that passes,
flows, or varies. As the grid since the Renaissance has been applied on a vertical
plane in order to master three-dimensional space in painting, so the grid applied
on a horizontal plane in Vicuna's open weaving brings to mind an archaeological
method for mapping ancient sites in an "objective" and clear way. Additionally, it
is important to mention that among the Quechua of Chinchero (Peru), there are
profound conceptual and linguistic links between the processes of working the
loom and working the earth. Here the '"'ord pampa refers both to the agricultur­
al plain and to the large, single-color sections of handwoven textiles. Khata is a

furrowed field ready for planting as well as the textile warp configuration ready
for pattern formation.5� Since Vicuna's materialization of the grid in this work
seems to be projected without vantage point, it may, more importantly, figure the
connection in weaving that is protecting. In this sense we can recall two exam­
ples o f protective clothing: the plain weaving of Penelope's fabric that-because
of its possibilities of doing and undoing-kept not only Penelope but also
Odysseus alive; and the plain weaving of the poncho, which is made like a blan­
ket with a central slit for the head. Since its structure is part of "an eternal order,"
as Anni Albers tells us, the open (corral) weaving 'protects' the entering view­
er/reader and the land against the multinational grip of North American corpo­
rate agro-industry-which eliminates the "inferior" native corn to replace i t with
its own "rich" corn treated so as not to run to seed, so that the Chilean farmers
become completely dependent on those corporations for production.16
Moreover, taking up the grid's ambivalent relation to matter and to spirit, Vicuna
extends it in her work to imply the overlaying of modernity onto Andean culture,
and vice versa. "Flattened, geometrized, ordered, the grid is antinatural, antimimet­
ic, antireal . . . In the flatness that results from its coordinates, the grid is the means
of crowding out the dimensions of the real and replacing them with the lateral
spread of a single surface. In the overall regularity of its organization, it is the result
not of imitation, but of aesthetic decree. n;; According to Rosalind Krauss, "although
the grid is certainly not a story, it is a structure, and one, moreover, that allows a
contradiction between the values of science and those of spiritualism to maintain

3I
M. Catherine de Zegher

Quipu, from "Code of the Quipu. A Study in Media,

Mathematics, attd Culture" by Marcia Asher and Robert
Asher (The Universtty of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor ,

1981).

Antonio Gaudi, A Draft in 11m•ads: a srudy for the interior

of the Church Colonia CiJell (a resort for textile workers),
1898-1908.

themselves within the consciousness of modernism, or rather its unconscious,

as something repressed." Because of its bivalent structure the grid portends the
"centrifugal" or "centripetal" existence of the work of art. Presented as a mere
fragment, arbitrarily cropped from an infinitely larger fabric, \s the grid operates
outward, compelling our acknowledgment of a world beyond the frame, this is
the centrifugal reading (in relation to the operations of science, paradoxically
entailing the dematerialization of the surface). The centripetal one works from
the outer limits of the aesthetic object inward. "The grid is, in relation to this
reading, a re-presentation of everything that separates the work of art from the
world, from ambient space and from other objects. The grid is an introjection
of the boundaries of the world into the interior of the work; it is a mapping of
the space inside the frame onto itself" (a reading seemingly issuing from pure­
ly symbolist origins, paradoxically opposing "science" and "materialism").,9
Krauss states that, within the whole of modern aesthetic production, "the grid
has sustained itself so relentlessly while at the same time being so impervious
to change." One of the most modernist aspects of the grid is "its capacity to
serve as a paradigm or model for the antidevelopment, the antinarrative, the
antihistorical ."60

32
 Ouvrage: K n o t a Not, Notes as Knots

Apparently, in Vicuna's spatialized weaving, not only the plain surface of the grid
is under consideration but also the subversion of the line. The binary discourse on
the grid (nature vs. artifice, signifier vs. real, etc.) is caJied into question.
According to Deleuze and Guattari, "the smooth and the striated are distinguished
first of all by an inverse relation between the point and the line (in the case of the
striated, the line is between two points, while in the smooth, the point is between
two lines); and second, by the nature of the line (smooth-directional, open inter­
vals; dimensional-striated, closed intervals). Finally, there is a third difference,
concerning the surface or space. In striated space, one closes off a surface and
"allocates" it according to determinate intervals, assigned breaks; in the smooth,
one "distributes oneself in an open space, according to frequencies and i n the
course of one's crossing (logos and nomos)." Textile is a spatial construction real­
ized by negotiating supple and fixed elements. The spatial feature of weaving
occurs on several levels, through interpenetrating movements that are both exter­
nal to a defined surface and at the same time create that surface. Still, there is a
difference and a disjunction between the experience of space and the discourse of
space, between the hand and the weaving, between the gesture and the work. As
Lygia Clarks puts it: "The artisan entered into a dialogue with her/his work, whi.le
labor, increasingly automatized and mechanized, had lost every expressiveness in
its relation." Thus, Vicuna's weaving opens for the artist the possibility of finding
her own gestures filled with new meaning; and it wholly revises the meaning of
two values-the variable and the constant, the mobile and the fixed, the supple
and the solid-by bringing them simultaneously forward in the service of change.
The artist's enduring transpositions are the only constant in her work. With enor­
mous perspicacity she disorganizes and redefines the forms of meaning transmit­
ted to her from her Andean culture and from dominant Western cultures, in order
to overturn distinctions between the vernacular and the modern and to shift the
international models of language. Her use of multiple fluctuating referents and of
ambiguity applies to her visual art as well as to her poetry.

Knots in Wool as Notes. Simultaneously approaching and distancing herself

from so-called international movements or institutions, such as body art, land art,
and art.e povera, Vicuna chose a flexible though firm position unassimilable to dif­
ferent cultural programs. Her First spatial work, Quipu que no recuerda nada,
embraced the aesthetic of silence in an attempt to initiate a critique of the self­
reflexive model and its enforced hermeticism by challenging and refusing the
quietistic conditions of modernism from within.61 By the 1950s and the early
1960s, anthologies about twentieth century European modernist thought and
art62 had been translated across the Atlantic, published in Buenos Aires, and
found their way to Chile. These books were most important to Vicuna because
they strengthened her independent mind and language, and, more importantly,

33
M . Catherine d e Zegher

because they demonstrated components of a geometrical abstraction, also attrib­

uted to her own Andean and pre-Columbian culture.
It is in one of these art books that she noticed a photograph of Kurt Schwitters'
M erzbau ( 1 923-36) in Hannover. In 1965, moved by the domestic and precari­
ous aspects of Schwitters's work, Vicufia outlined a bare thread in her own bed­
room and entitled the work, significantly: Quipu que no 1·ectterda nad� (The
Quipu which Remembers Nothing). Consisting of woolen cords with knots, the
quipu is an Inca instrument that registers events, circumstances, and numerals.
Ancient documents tell us that these registering artifacts continued to be used
during the first period of the conquista, t o be replaced later by written systems.
Nowadays, in certain very traditional communities of the Andean highlands, the
use of artifacts similar to the quipu still persists.61 The largest and most complex
quipu, found within the extensive region of Tawantinsuyu, is on display in the
Museo Chileno de Arte Precolombino in Santiago. According to the museum's
catalogue it was excavated from an Inca cemetery in Mollepampa, in the valley
of the Lluta river, near what is now the city of Arica. Seven white cords without
knots, joined to the main cord by a red bow, divide six sets of ten groups of cords
each. Near the end of the instrument are nine white, knotless cords and one with
only one knot. The quip1� ends in eleven sets of cords. These sets of cords, each
with its knots, are formed by a main cord from which secondary ones derive,
some of which produce more cords of a third category. The location of these sets
and that of the cords and knots within, the way of twisting each cord, and the
colors used are part of a symbolism still not completely deciphered. We know
only that the positioning of the knots on the cord makes use of or refers to the
decimal system. It seems that the colors encoded nonnumeroJogical information.
Recent research suggests that the quipu was also used as a mnemonic device for
oral poetry and philosophy.
Thus, the entire quipu carries meaning: the length, the form, the color, the num­
ber of knots. Simultaneously the endless tying and retying of knots allows contin­
uous marking and modification. At the most, on a literal level one could say that
in contradistinction to other writing systems the quipu provides opportunity for
infinite inscription since what is "inscribed" is never fixed. The act of doing and
undoing, as in weaving, offers multitudinous possibilities or beginnings, flexibility,
and mobility. In this sense Vicuna's Quipu. que no recuerda nada synthezises an
attitude toward life, language, memory, and history in a postcolonial country, where
the process of transformation generated the foundation for a new socialist collec­
tive culture. On the verge of being willing to lose any trace of representation,
Cecilia Vicuna oscillates, on the one hand, between the various constructivist
strategies of transparency of procedures, self-referentiality of signifying devices,
and reflexive spatial organization, and on the other hand, the strategies of differ­
entiation of subjective experience and of historical reflection. Taking into account

34
 Ouvrage: Knot a Not, Notes a s Knots

Areo d eArra)•tm, 1990. Mixed rnedia, 51 x 3 0x 5 ern.

the experience of colonialism (and even more of neocolonial dependence), with its
legacies of oppression and destruction, from which her identity emerged, she holds
on to the name: Quipu. Taking account of the desire of a new generation to be
"absolutely modern," Vicuna wanted to articulate a beginning and to position her­
self at this beginning, but within the pre-Columbian and colonial history. She per­
ceives "beginning" the way Edward W. Said describes it: "Beginning is making or
producing difference; but difference which is the result of combining the already­
familiar with the fertile novelty of human work in language."6'

Knot in a Handkerchief. Perhaps at first the connection seems incongruous.

However, I wish to analyze and emphasize the relationship between the work of
Cecilia Vicuna and that of Kurt Schwitters in the context of Chilean colonial his­
tory. Although her earliest encounter with the German artist's work was no more
than the encounter with a photograph, and although it was only much later, in
the 1980s, that she learned more about his work, there is an affinity worth explor­
ing. Both artists' oeuvres agree on several issues: nonrepresentational multime­
dia constructions, a "nonobjective" art, emphasis on connection · and interac­
tion-the "directional" rather than the "dimensional"; the use of refuse; the
strategies of naming (Merz and Precario) ; and also the experimentation with other
art forms, for example poetry. The elements of poetry such as letters, syllables,

35
M . Catherine de Z e g he r

words, and sentences are permitted to interact and create meaning.65 Most strik­
ing, however, is the similarity in the construction procedure of the Merzbau, con­
ceived in Schwitters's house, and Vicuna's Quipu, which was realized in her bed­
room without knowledge of the former's installation method, and would be the
groundwork for all her later spatial weavings. Their thought processes seem to
run parallel. As a result of the particular interest in how various materials, irclud­
ing the components of his own works, combine and interact, Schwitters started
by tying strings in his studio from one object, picture, or work to another to
emphasize or materialize that interaction. Eventually, the strings became wires,
then were replaced with wooden structures, which, in turn, were joined with
plaster of Paris. The structures grew and merged, and eventually filled several
rooms, resembling a huge abstract grotto.•• (In a way this structure also reminds
us of the system of suspended threads that Gaudi used in the Iglesia de la
Colonia Guell ( 1908-14} to research construction principles and modeling
methods, which would later be applied in La Sagrada Familia in Barcelona.67
During his experiments of forms in tension, Gaudi used loose threads and weav­
ings to visualize the constitution of walls and ceilings.)
Schwitters had called his principle of artistic creation with any material Merz.
Since a fragment of a scrap of a bank advertisement pasted in a collage hap­
pened to show the four casual letters MERZ, this became the general term by
which he referred to his work. His naming process is clearly based on his appre­
ciation for the accidental, the trivial, the inconsequential. Elsewhere, he wrote
that this word Merz came from the German ausmerzen (to weed out, extirpate),
and that ironically it threw light on both the bright side of dadaism and the dark
side of expressionism."8 The Merz works are characterized by diverse materials
glued and nailed on the picture surface, and by the application of color in lim­
ited sections. Schwitters used to say: "The material is as unimportant as myself.
Important is only the creation. And because the material is unimportant, T take
any material a picture demands. As I let different materials interact, I have an
advantage compared to oil painting, as I can ·Create interaction, not only betvveen
colour and colour, line and line, form and form, but also between material and
material, e.g. wood and sackcloth."•9 A few artists among his contemporaries
were also liter�llly choosing this diversity of materials from the urban environ­
ment.io Later on, after World Vvar II, many artists began to select their materi­
als from the refuse generated by urban life and industrial "progress." Vicuna was
also motivated to use discarded objects in defiance of an excluding differentia­
tion. This impartiality (or abstractness) is maintained once the found objects are
appropriated as materials. Such nonhierarchical use of materials allows reflec­
tions on balance, equality, and freedom, which are emphasized by the fragile
state of equilibrium in many of her precarious ojects (e.g., Balancin, 198 1 ; Pesa,
1984; Espiral de ]ezik, 1 990).

36
 Ouvrage: Knot a Not, Notes as Knots

In addition to the aesthetic considerations and the formal analogies of

Schwitters's and Vicuna's work, it is of interest to compare the recurrences of
both the process of naming and the use of waste materials in a specific socio­
economic environment: Schwitters in Germany before World War I I and Vicuna
in Chile before the dictatorship.71 While Vicuna elucidated extensively her atten­
tion {later to become studiousness) to dadaism and its precedents in her art and
poetry practices, she noticed the exaltation of memory and lament in both the
pre-Columbian and German romantic poetry. Dissolving identities and shattering
the communicative, representative aspect of language in favor of a dynamic con­
ception of art, the avant-garde artists further gave rise to a theory of the subject
in process, a subject equally constituted by symbolic and semiotic elements.
Considering them rebels in a restraining society, Vicuna embraced the modernist
vanguard aesthetic and poetry as a liberating force, contributing in one inward
movement to both-on the one hand, to the newly defined social production of
culture propagated by the Unidacl Popular of the Marxist President Salvador
Allende, and on the other hand, to the resistance against colonization and its
ramifications in an emerging totalitarian regime.71

Desire of the Hand. If my presumed equation were based on a linear thought

that implied notions of filiation and belatedness, instead of on aesthetic and
sociopolitical recurrences and convergences in time, it would constitute yet
another neocolonial attempt to create predecessors of South American art in
Europe. I t remains imperative to read Vicuna's work as well, which fuses the
knowledge of a colonial Chilean and local Andean culture with the quest for a
global avant-garde, in reference to propositions made by her contemporaries in
South America. Her determination to break away from the universalist claims of
geometric abstraction, without abandoning a nonfigurative, geometric vocabulary
and the general social concerns of constructivism, and her desire to take on the
complexity of human reality and still remain receptive to her immediate environ­
ment, parallel the earlier attitudes of the neoconcrete group in Brazil (Lygia
Clark, Helio Oiticica, Lygia Pape, Amilcar de Castro, Franz Weissmann,
Reynaldo Jardim, Theon Spanudis, the poet Ferreira Gullar, and the art critic
Mario Pedrosa). These artists affirmed the values of modernity and eschewed
"regionalist realism," but restated the problem of subjectivity in a specific
Brazilian context. In the Manifesto neoconcretoH ( 1959) they attacked the posi­
tivism and mechanistic reductionism of the philosophy of Max Bill and the
Hochschule fur Gestaltung Ulm as ignoring the real conditions of Brazil; it was
designed for an advanced capitalist/industrial society. Significantly, the neocon­
crete work of Lygia Clark and Helio Oiticica "gradually lost the technological
sheen associated with constructivism and moved (in very different ways) towards
the use of common and relatively valueless materials which were 'at hand' in the

37
M . C a t he r ine de Zegher

everyday environment of Rio."" Notwithstanding the isolation of these artists and

the lack of communication among most countries in South America, it appears
that in 1966 in Chile Vicuna was naming her works arte precario. That same year
in Brazil Clark was describing "precariousness as a new idea of existence against
all static crystallization within duration; and the very time of the act as a field of
experience "7s As much as Vicuna seems to rejoin the pursuit of Schvvitters, Clark
and Oiticica seem to reawaken visionary proposals and efforts of prewar artists
(such as Duchamp, Mondriaan, and Van Tongerloo, known through the Biennals
of Sao Paulo) to resist ''lhe growing realm of the commodity." At the same time,
in the 1960s and 1 970s, these South American artists positioned themselves in
relation to the international claims of the arte povera, resolutely stressing their
own terminology and its intrinsic differences. In a letter to Clark (I 0/l 5/68),
Oiticica states:
For European and North American expression, this is the great difference: the so-called
Italian arte povera is done with the most advanced means: it is the sublimation of poverty, but
in an anecdotal, visual WS)', de l iberately poor but actually quite rich: it is the assimilation oF
the remains of an oppressive civilization and their transformation into consumption, the cap·
italization of the idea of poverty. To us, it does not seem lhat the economy of elements is
directly connected with the idea of st ructure with the nontechnique as discipline, with the
,

freedom of creation as the super-economy, in which the rudimentary element in itself liber­
ates open structures··

According to Guy Brett, "material-linguistic objects like Oiticica's Bolides

(bolide = fireball in Portugese), his Parangoles (capes), Penetrables, Nests etc., and
Clark's individual and collective 'propositions' using plastic, sacking, stones, air,
string, sand, water etc., are not 'representatiions' but cel ls, nucleuses, or energy­
centres. The object itself is secondary, appropriated, incomplete, existing only to
initiate dialogue, and to indicate 'environmental and social wholes' (Oiticica).
Literally, in many cases, they cannot exist without human support. "77 In her coun·
try Vicuna responded to the same cultural necessity and was drawn to the same
tendencies of "expanding beyond the concept of the art object, beyond the gallery
and the museum, into the environment, mixing media, and inviting the partici·
pation of the public."78 Striking here are the concurrences not only in the use of
"precarious" materials (netting, strings, shells), but also in the notions of
space/time, of beginning, of bodily action (perception, touch, manipulation,
voice, smell; the "eye-body"), of dialogue, even of another basic human creation:
architecture. I f for Lygia Clark a "living biological architecture" was created by
people's gestures, and if Oiticica's sensory and social nucleuses, like his Nes�s,
cabins, and Penetrahles, poetically suggest new ways of constructing and inhabit­
ing the environment-"as a metaphor of communication," then Vicuna's
Weavings show points of interface within the semiotic/linguistic research of
"nest" and "text" (discussed earlier).

38
 Ouvrage: Knot a Not, N o t e s as Knots

Marcel Duchamp, First Papers of Surrealism, J 942,

© 1998 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New Yorlt I ADAGP. Paris I
Estate of Marcel Duchamp.

Cildo J\lleireles, La Bmja, Sao Paulo Biennal, J 98 J . Courtesy of the artist.

Lo Nunca Projectado.79 However, in all these works it is the action of time and
of "spatialization" that is most intelligible. What they mean by spatialization of
the work is "the fact that it is always in the present, always in the process of begin­
ning over, of beginning the impulse that gave birth to it over again-whose origin
and evolution it contains simultaneously" (Neoconcretist Manifesto) I n this
sense the repetitive texture of crisscrossing straight lines, and eventually the grid,
in Vicuna's woven works are formally closer to the accumulative system of join­
ing wire cables in the kinetic Reticularea (ambientaci6n) (1968-76) and the
Dibu.jos sin papel (Drawings without Paper} by the Venezuelan artist Gego, than
to the arbitrary clusters of thread in La Bruja (The Broom) by Cildo Meireles
(Brazil) at the Biennal of Sao Paulo,R0 or the earlier installation work by Marcel
Duchamp at the exhibition First Papers of Surrealism. (1942) in New York. The use
of thread in these latter installation works is rather dealing with the problems of
cultural institutionalization and reception to "openly denounce the validity of the
retrospective exhibition and criticize the quasi-religious veneration of the accul­
turation. "81 At first sight Meireles's work appears as a gratuitous gesture enhanc­
ing chaotic dispersal, dust and dirt (at least the critics were heavy), but then one
discovers that it is organized by this small domestic cleaning tool., Is sweeping a
space not the best way to know it? Is it not about making measurements in the
head with the hands?
Basting the space with large, loose stitches, Vicuna recently constructed
Hilumbreslallqa at the Beguinage Saint-Elizabeth in Kortrijk.82 To realize a double

39
M . Cettherine de Z e g h e r

Gego, Reticularea, 1968. Courtesy Americas Society, New Yorh. Photo: juan Santana.

"weaving in space" she uses industrial black and white cotton spun in Flemish
factories out of raw materials mainly imported from the so-called third world
(Turkey, Egypt, Peru, etc.). "I speak to the moment in which the visible becomes
invisible and vice versa," said Vicuna, "to the moment when the cognition, the
definition, has not yet been formed. Moving through the room people should dis­
cover the limits and traps of their own perception, the wandering attention."
Hi.lumbres, a word invented by Vicuna, is composed of two words hilo!lumbre
(thread/light), meaning "the thread catching light" or "the thread of light"; allqa is
an Aymara word and a textile term that refers to a sharp contrast in the play of
light and shadow. In weaving, it applies to the connection or encounter of things
that can never be together: black and white. In Andean weaving this union of
oppositions generates a degradation-or, as Vicuna formulates it, " a soft stairway, "
vvhich argues for a model of subjectivity not rooted in binary thought: self/other,
love/hate, aggression/identification, rejection/incorporation. Similarly it should be
noted that in Andean and Mayan textiles the joints between two woven panels are
often the focus of articulation and elaboration. "The seam itself is not rendered
unobtrusive as it i s in our apparel. Instead it is emphasized by silk or rayon stitch­
ing of bold color and emphatic form. This is called the randa."R3 Dealing with the
past and the other, the crossing of borderlines and the seams of cultural articula­
tion are highlighted in this work.

40
 Ouvrage: Knot a Not, Notes as K n o t s

The words of Lygia Clark about her Trailing ( 1 964) express similar thoughts
about a continuum, a "matrixial" space: "If I use a Mobius strip for this experi­
ment, it's because it breaks with our spatial habits: right/left; front/back, etc. It
forces us to experience a limitless time and a continuous space."u• The explo­
ration of another possibility of seeing that is not the phallic gaze is at stake in
Vicuna's work and in this sense it rejoins the issues in the paintings of Bracha
Lichtenberg Ettinger, who developed the psychoanalytical theory of "Matrix and
Metramorphosis. "85 Griselda Pollock, who has systematically and profoundly ana­
lyzed the painting of Lichtenberg Ettinger, explains that modalities based on the
rejection/assimilation paradigm apply to how paintings are viewed as much as to
how societies treat immigrants. "What is not us, strange and unknown, be that
woman for man, the other for the white European, the painting for the viewer is
positioned under this phallic logic as either one of the two terms: to be assimi­
lated and if that is not possible to be cast off as completely other."86 Lichtenberg
Ettinger argues for "a shift of the phallic" by introducing the "matrix " For
if we allow ourselves to introduce into culture another symbolic signifier to stand beside
the phallus (signifier of difference and division, absence and loss and orchestrating these
either/or models), could we not be on the way to allowing the invisible feminine bodily
spe cificity to enter and realign aspects of our consciousnesses and unconsciousnesses?
This will surely extend as do all these metaphors of sexual difference to other others­
issues of r ace immigration, diaspora, genocide are tangled at the moment around the lack
,

of means to signify other possible relations between different subjects-! and non-!. The
matrix as symbol is about that encounter between difference which tries neither to mas­
ter, nor assimilate, nor reject, nor a.lienate. It is a symbol of the coexistence in one space
of two bodies, two subjectivities whose encounter at this moment is not an either/or''

Poetry in Space. Vicuna's ouvrage challenges such questions of recent art as the
status of the object, the relation of the artist and the viewer/reader, bodily action,
the space/time relation, the environment, inner and outer, the connection of the
visual to the other senses, at once moving viewers away from their habit of com­
partmentalizing artistic production into separate media. At the same time it evokes
a polemical attitude toward modernity, investigating a universal artistic develop­
ment without negating local forms of expression. Her elaboration of popular ele­
ments shows links with bricolage and as such involves continual reconstruction
from the same materials (in the sense that it is always previous ends that are called
upon to play the part of means).88 Thus Vicuna reconsiders the changes of the sig­
nified into the signifying and vice versa. Vicuna dwells in im/possibility (as did
Violeta Parra and Xul Solar). She demands a laying open of the mechanisms that
produce meaning: particularly, the formation of a language. Her ideal is a dis­
course characterized by plurality, the open interplay of elements, and the possib­
lity of infinite recombination.89 However, Vicuna concludes that "(visual) language
speaks of its own process: to name something which can not be named."

41
M . Catherine de Zegher

Working with and writing about Cecilia Vicuna is a privilege and a pleasure, and I therefore thank her. For
their continuous support and for critically reading this essay my warm thanks go to Benjamin Buchloh, and
also to Jean Fisher and Sally Stein. Last but not least I am very thankful to my family who allowed me­
but luckily not always-to disappear behind my desk.

NOTES:
I . Julia Avcrkieva and Mark A. She1·man. Kwahiutl String Figures, Anthropological Papers of the American
Museum oF Na tura l History, vol. 7 1 (New York, 1992).
2. I bid., xiii.
3. L. A. Dickey ( 1928}, String Figures froru Hawaii in B. P. Bishop Museum Bulletin, no. 54 (New York:
,

Kraus Reprint, 1 985), I I .

4. Cecil a i Vicuna, "Metafisica del textil.' in Revista Tramemos 1/ (Buenos Aires, 1989).
5. Elizabeth Wayland Barber, Women's Work: 11.e First 20,000 Years. Women, Cloth, and Society in Early
Times (NewYork and London: W. W. Norton, 1 994 ), 29-33.
6. Ibid.
7. Cecilia Vicuna creates the new verb pal<�hrir, which means "to open words,' noting that ahrir (to open)
ol'iginal ly meant parir (to give birth ).
8. Huipil is a rec tangula r or square shirt, sewn on the sides. with a circular opening for the head. made of
cotton or wool, and usually embroidered. Worn in Mesoamerica since pre-Columbian times, it is still used
in the south of Mexico and Guatemala, where indigenous women continue to weave lwipiles both for their
own use and for trade.
9. Janet Catherine Serlo, "Beyond Brico lage: Women and Aest he tic Strategies in Latin American Textiles,"
in Textile Traditions of Mesoa111ericn and The Andes: An Anthology, ed. Margot Blum Schevill (New York:
Garland Press, 199 1 ), 437-467.
I 0. Cec ilia Vicuna. Unravelli11g Words and the Wetn'ing of Water (St. Paul. Minn.· Graywolf Press, 1 992).
I I. Cecil ia Vicuna, La Wik'rma (Santiago, Chile: Francisco Zegers Editor. 1990).
12. Lucy Lippard, O.•crlay (New York: Pantheon Books, 1983), 106.
13. Henri Michaux, 'The Beginni11gs. trans. James Wanless; from Su/fm no. 34 (Spring 1994). 116.
14. Lygia Clark, "Nostal gia of the Bod)•," Octol:�er 69 (Summer 1994), 85-109.
1 5 . Lippard, Overlay , 106.
16. Cec il ia Vicuna, Precario!Precariot•s trans. Anne Twitt)' (New York: Tanam Press, 1983).
,

1 7 . Clark, "Nostalgia," 85-109.

18. Cecilia Vicuna quotes that "art" and " order" derive borh from the same root, ar ( to fit together). The
word armus (upper arm) comes from what the arms did. In this sense the Latin ars (art) was "skill," and the
Latin ordo (order) from ordiri (to begin to weave) was "a row of threads in a loom."
19. Jean Fischer, " I : I Lynn Silverman." exhib. cat. (Angel Row Gallery, Camerawork. and th e University of
Derby. 1993). .
20. Guy Brett, about Robe rto Evangelista's lmmersimr, in America. Bride of the Srm. 500 years Lati11
America and the Low Countnes, cxhib. cat. (Antwerp: Royal Museum of Fi ne Arts, 1992), 245-246.
21. The desaparecidos . or the "disappeared ones." was the name given by the people of the sout hern cone
(Chile, Uruguay, and Argentina) to men and women who were led away by the secret police from their
homes or in the streets during the dictatorsh ips of the seventie s because they were never seen again,
,

and the military police denied having taking them in the first p lace. Only after )'ears of struggle, human
rights organizations were able to demonstrate that the peop le who had been "disappeared" by the thou·
sands not only did exist, but had been effectively tortured to death and/or murdered b)' the military
regimes of the three countries. Only some of the collective or individual burials have been found; some­
times their bodies were exploded by dynamite, sometimes bathed in lime and then covered by soil to ren­
der them unrecognizable.
22. Vicuna, Precario!Precarious .
23. Averkieva and Sherman, Kwakiutl String Figures, 137-1 50.
24. Kathleen Haddon, Artists ur String (London: Methuen, 1930), 145; (re print ed.; New York: AMS Press,
1979).
25. Claude Levi-Strauss, Stn•ctural Antl�ropology (New York: Basic books. 1963), 31-54.

42
 Ouvrage: Knot a Not, Notes as Knots

26. Cecilia Vicuna, Palahrir (Forthcoming; Cditorial Sudamericana Chile) .

,

27. Cecilia Vicul'la, Srrl?or a mf ( Devon, England: Beau Geste Press, 1973).
28. Barbara and Dennis Tedlock, "Text and Textile: Language and Technology in the Arts oF the Quich�
Maya," ]ottrna/ ofAr!ll!ropological Research 4 1 .2 ( 1985), 121-146.
29 Berlo, "Beyond Bracolage.'
30. Levi-Strauss, Stmctural Anthropology, 21.
3 1 . Gesar Paternosto speaks oF "l\1ajor Art"; Wilham Conklin of "Textile Age." See Cesar Patermosto, The
Stone artd the Thread: Andean Roots of Abstract Art (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996).
32. Andre Leroi-Gourhan, L' homme er Ia nrat1t!re , Albin Michel, 244.
33. Mary Jane jacobs. "Anni Albers: A Modern Weaver as Artist," in The Woven an.d Graphic Art of Anni
Albers (\oVashington. D.C.: Smithsonian l nst iLU tion Press, 1985). 65.
34. Ibid., 22 and plate I .
35. Ibid., 66.
36. Ibid., 71-72.
37. Cecilia Viculla says that this dichotomy is not a general rule in the conunent. Women shamans tn many
indigenous societies have used words in their heahng practices. Also Maria Sabina among the Mazatecs, the
Machi among the 1\ila puche in Chile and Argentina. and the Quechua women of Ecuador have subverted
this dichotomy.
38. Berlo, "B eyond B ricolagc."
39. Mol.r is a rectangular piece of cotton cloth. with applique of other cotton pieces sewn in. to make
designs and symbols as in patchwork. Originally worn and created by the Cuna indigenous women oF
Panama, today it is a flourishing form of social commentary, with molas carryingpolitical messages, sports,
and TV events, together "�th the ancient S) mbols, to be worn by the women themselves (as part of their
•

shirt) and to be sold to tourists.

40. Mary W. Helms, C1111a Molas and Cocle Art Forms. Working Papers m the Traditional Arts, no. 7
( Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Human Issues, 1981).
41. Berlo. "Beyond B ricolage."
42. Ruth Bunzel, ClrichictrStenango: A Guatemahrn Vilhrge (Seattle: University of Washington Press. 1952), 308.
43. Berlo, "Beyond Bricolagc."
44. Ibid.
45. A famous example is the "Manifesto" that Oliverio Girondo (1891-1967) wrote for the fourth issue of
Martin Fierro ( 1924). "Summoning the avant garde forces to the task of resuscitating the language, Girondo
·

asserts that fresh life c an be brought to Spanish only by finding new models outside literary Spanish: the
agitatei:l and frenetic tones of the technologized era oF mass communicatio ns."
46. Naomi Li ndstrom, "Live Language Against Dead: Literary Rebels of Buenos Aires," review in Latin
American Literature and Arts . no. 3 1 , New York Qan april 1982).
·

47. El mirar cmzado means: looking at something from (two) different points of view, mixing the sources;
in Cecil ia Vicuna's unpublished manu script Fragmeutos M Poeticas .
48. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Tho11sa11d Plateaus, Capit<Jlism and Sclrizcphrenia , trans. Brian
i\lassumi (�linneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 474-500.
49. Deleuze and Guauari, A Thoustmd Plateaus . 475.
50. Deleuze and Cuauari say on p. 429 that "Haptic' is a better word than 'tactJ!e' since it docs not estab·
lish an opposition between two sense organs but rather invites the assumption that the eye itself may fulfill
this nonoptical Function."
5 1 . Ibid. , 493.
52. I bid.
53. Ibid., 499.
54. Ibid., 446-447.
55. Berlo, "Beyond Bricolage."
56. In fact this situauon is part of an ongoing process of destroying nath•e agricul ture since colonial times.
At first not only most of the wild wheat was devastated by the conquistadores -to be replaced by imported
western whe3L, which the Indian population had to buy-buL also a great number of a lpacas and llamas
were killed so that these herds had to be replaced by sheep and cows sold at very high prices. See also

43
M . Catherine de Zegher

Cecilia Vicuna, "The Invention of Poverty,' in America. Bride of the Sun, 5 1 4-51 5 .
57. Rosalind E. Krauss, Tlte Originalit)• of the Avattt·Garde and Other Modernist Nl)lths (Cambridge, Mass.:
MIT Press, 1986), 8-22.
58. Cf. Anni Albers, who said: "It is for this reason that we can find certitude in the belief that we are tak·
ing part in an eternal order." In Jacobs, The Woven and Graphic Art ofAu ni Albers.
59. Krauss, Originality of the Avmrt ·Garde.
60. Ibid.
61. Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, "Refuse and Refuge," in Gabriel Orozco, exhib. cat. (Konrijk: Kanaal Art
Foundation, 1993).
62. Examples are: Jean Cassou's Pauormun de las mies contemporai!Cas ; J. E. Cirlot's El arte ot.ro; and Aldo
Pellegrini. ed. and trans., Antologia de Ia poes(tl Sllrrealista (Buenos Aires: Fabril Editora, 1961 ).
63. A Noble Andean Art , exhib. cat. (Santiago de Chile: Museo Chilena de Arte Precolombino ), 72-73, no.
0780: Quipu , Camelid fibers, Inca, 1470-1532 A.D.; main cord length : 168 ems.
64. Edward W. Said, Beginnings: Intentions and Method (New York: Columbia University Press. 1985).
65. Kurt Schwiucrs said: "I let nonsense mteract with sense. I prefer nonsense, but that is a purely personal
matter. I feel sorry for nonsense, since, so far, it has rarely been formed art istically. Therefore I love non·
sense." See Ernst Sch"�tters, "Kurt Schwitters-Father of Merz-My Father," 1 4 1 .
66. Mer. = Kurt Scl1witt-ers , Karnizawa, The Museum of Modern Arr, Seibu Takanawa, Tokyo, Oct-Nov.
1983; Erns t Schwiuers, "Kurt Schwitters-father of Nlerz -l\lly Father," 142.
67. Jean Fran�ois Pirson, La structure et /'objet (Liege: Metaphorcs. 1984), 29. The Iglesia de Ia Colonia
GUell was commissioned by Eugenio Guell to Gaudi in 1898. It was constructed for a colony of textile work·
ers and became a laboratory for experiences related to the construction of La Sagrada Familia. Gaudi col­
laborated with the architects, F. Berengucr and J. Canaleta, and with the engineer, E. Coctt..
68. Werner Schmalenbach, Kurt Schwitters (Koln, 1967), 93. Merz is the second syllable of Kommerz (com­
merce). The name originated from the Merzbild. a picture in which the word Merz could be read in between
abstract forms. Schmalenbach quotes Schwitters as saying "When I first exhibited these pasted and nailed
pictures with the Sturm in Berlin. I searched for a collective noun for this new kind of picture, because I
could not define thern with the older conceptions like Expressionism, Futurism or whatever. So I gave all
my pictures the name 'Merz-pict urcs' after the most characteristic of them and thus made them like a
species. Later on I expanded this name 'Merz' to include my poetry (I had written poetry since 1 9 1 7), and
finally all my relevant activities.'
69. Schwitters, ''Kurt Schwitters-Father of Men -fdy Father," I4 I.
70. Yusuke Nakahara, in Merz = Kurt Sclnvitters .
7 1 . The grandfather of Vicuna, who was the writer and civil rights activist and lawyer Carlos Vicuna
Fuentes (Dean of the University of Chile and Deputate to the Chilean Parliament). had received in his
home a group of refugees from the S1)anish Civil War. Among the refugees were the playwl'i ter Jose
Ricardo Morales and the ed itors Arturo Soria and Carmelo Soria, who was later murdered by the secret
police of Pinochet. These men and their families became part of Cecilia Vicuna's family and education.
It should be remembered here that the Nazis were also instru mental in the rise of Franco and the defeat
of the Spanish Republic. Carlos Vicuna Fuentes was made an "honorary jew" by the Jewish community
in Santiago as a result of his antifascist activities.
72. During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries several presidents carried out an explicit policy of
"Germanization" and facilitated German immigration to the South of Chile "in order," so they said, "to bring
prosperity to a forsaken land and to improve the Indian race. Thus they were encouraging the "populating"
•

of the provinces south of the Araucania (Valdivia. Osorno. Llanquihuc) by taking the land from the
Mapuche. During World War II a German Fascist presence in the South of ChHe was evident through the
existence of support groups for t he Nazis (National Socialist Parties) and after the war this presence was
enforced by the arrival of exiled and former Nazis, from whom it is now known that they participated i n the
dictatorship of General Pinochet.
73. Reproduced in Ronalda Brito, Neoconcrerismo, Vertice e R upt11ra (Rio de Janeiro: Funarte, 1985), I 2-13;
reprinted in French translation in Robho 4, and in English translation in October 69, (Summer 1994), 91-95.
74. Guy Brett, "Lygia Clark: The Borderline Between Art and Life." Tl1ird Text I (Autumn 1987), 65-94.
75. Clark, "Nostalgia of the Body," I 06.

44
 Ouvrage: K n o t a N o t , N o t e s as Knots

76. "lsso e a grande diferen�a para a expressao europr:\ia e americana do norte: a tal povera arte itaIiana e
feita com os meios mais avan,ados: e a sublima�ao da pobrez.a, mas de modo aned6tico, '�sua!, proposital­
mcnte pobre mas na verdade bern rica: e a assimila�ao dos resros de uma civiliza�ao opressiva c sua trans­
formar;ao em consumo, a capitaliza,ao da ideia de pobreza. Para nos, nao parece que a economia de ele­
mentos esta diretamente ligada a ideia de estrutura, a nao-tecnica como disciplina, a liberdade de crias-ao
como a supra·economia, onde o elemento rudimentar ja Iibera estruturas abertas." In Lygia Clar!t e Hel.io
Oiticica, Sala especial do 9. Salao Nacional de Artes Pl�sticas (Rio de Janeiro: Funartc, !986-87).
77. Brett, "Lygia Clark," 75.
78. Ibid.
79. Lo nrmca projectado is the title of an album with poems by Alfredo Silva Estrada and illustrations by
Gego (!964).
80. La Bru.cha consisted of 2500 km of white cotton thread unrolled in a fortuitous way through every sin·
gle space all over the three Aoors of the Sienna! Building to end up at a broom placed in a little store-room
near the toilets.
8 1 . Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, "The Museum Fictions of Marcel Broodthaers," Museums by Artists , cd. A.A.
Bronson and Peggy Gale (Toronto: Art Metropole, 1983). "Vintage cobweb? Indeed not!" Duchamp was
reported to have said.
82. Exhibition of Cecilia Vicuna in the series "Inside the Visible. Begin the Beguine in Flanders," organized
by the Kanaal Art Foundation as Cultural Ambassador of Flandres, (Oct. I -De e. I I). l 994.
83. Bcrlo, "Be)•ond Bricolagc," 453.
84. Clark, "Nostalgia of the Body."
85. Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger, "Matrix and Metramorphosis," in Differences: A journal of Feminist
Cul.tmal Studies 4.3; and "The Becoming Threshold of Matrixial Borderlines," in Travellers' Tales (London:
Routledge, J 994).
86. Griselda Pollock, "Oeuvres Autistes," \krsus 3 (1994): I 4· l 8.
87. Ibid
88. Claude Levi-Strauss, Th.e Savage Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, I 966), 2 1 .
89. Naomi Lindstrom, "Xul Solar: Star-Spangler o f Languages." Review: Latir1 American Literature and. Arts
25/26, 1 2 1 .

45
Bogota, 1981. Photo: Oscar Monsalve.
 METAPHOR SPUN:
A CONVERSATION WITH CECILIA VICUNA

PoETHY READING AND PERFORMANCE,

CoRNELL UNIVERSITY, FALL 1994

Billie Jean Isbell and Regina Harrison

C ecilla Vicuna left the podium and walked down the aisle of the auditorium. Her
words and movements laid an intricate trail as she unraveled a ball of brightly
colored yarn. The image on the screen, a moving river with stone banks, had threads
suspended above the flow in a seemingly random pattern. I t was the spatial realiza­
tion of her poem "Antivero," in Unravelling of Words and the Weaving of Water (16),
,

The river wants to be heard before it is contaminated.

The fiipas are its spirits, its guardi ans. The perfumed shrub.
Thread is a trail
I'm lost on
the trail is a scent
I travel

What came to my mind was a scene common to high passes in the An des where
pas sersby crisscross yarn from one stone to another in order to suspend offerings
such as small animals or fruit accompanied by so ngs and prayers to feed the
Earth Mother and the Mountain Deities. In my imagination, Vicuna's poems
were songs and prayers liberating the animated places of the earth. Her poem
"The Chibcha Trail," expresses this beautifully.

Poetry lives in certain places

where the cliffs need nothing
but a sign to come alive:

47
Billie Jean Isbell and Regina Harrison

lwo or three lines, a marking,

and silence begins to speak ( 17).

J closed my eyes for a moment and saw Cecilia Vicuna "nosing" her way along
an Andean mountain pass, listening to the songs of the stones, the river, and the
earth. She wore traditional Andean dress: a lliqlla, pollera, felt hat and rubber tire
sandals. Her long, black straight hair was plaited in two long braids with deco­
rated wool ribbons and fuzzy balls tied to the ends. They swung seductively on
her hips. Instead of a ball of yarn in her hands, she carried a spindle whorl; lhe
drop of the spindle matched the cadence of her song. I had translated her per­
sona and poetry into the essence of a n Andeanness-a vicuna. Eliot Weinberger
says the vicuna is her totem, but as I became absorbed in her performance, I was
not sure that totem was the correct figure. Totemism is often associated with
patriliny and she embodies the power of the feminine voice. 1 imagine that her
own thread led to a line of creative women. What was her personal history? How
did she come by her sensibilities, her connection to the earth and water? With
such questions in mind, I was pleased to accept the invitation to write this intro­
duction and I invited Regina Harrison to participate in an interview with Cecilia
Vicuna . The discussion below is drawn from an afternoon of delightful conver­
sation in Spanish between Cecilia Vicuna (CV), Regina Harrison (RH), and Billie
Jean Isbell (BJI) in New York City in April, 1995.
Billie Jean Isbell, June 199 5

THE E s s EN CE o F A NAMB

RH: Your name alone makes you "authentic" Andean, doesn't it? When you first
sent me your book, La Wik'wia, in 1991 I was so envious of you . that there
_ .

was no separation between your poetics and your being; I mean your name and
your title are one, a special kind of "entitlement" these days. Pablo Neruda and
Gabriela Mistral consciously chose their names, new names, but you are vicuna
right away, forever. You the vicuna and Cesar Vallejo the puma in that exquisite
line of his: "Quiero escribir pero me siento puma I I want to write but I feel
puma," but he couldn't claim Andean essence in a name as you can, while regis­
tering your birth on your birth certificate. Eliot Weinberger writes of you that the
vicuna is your totemic animal. I ask because before coming to meet with you I
had an image of you, feathers and firm thigh muscles, from reading your poems.
Are these two good symbols of you?

CV: I'm connected to the world of feeling. A feather? I am a feather. A piece of

yarn? I a m a piece of yarn. An animal? I am an animal. But I pause here at what
you say because I had an invitation from a group of women lo contribute to a new

48
 Metaphor S p u n : A Conversation

journal, one called Chain, and they wrote me saying that they saw my work as a
paradigm for them. Their call for work asked "how does the topical world filter
through the word?" Thinking of this question I discovered a geometric mark on
my thigh that I had never seen before. All of a sudden I realized that it was exact­
ly the same mark I had inscribed on the earth in a place called Purmamarca,
which I consider the earth's thighl
Yes, thighs have always been quite something for me. \iVomen have muscles in
their thighs that men don't have, ones that close up the vagina. (This made a
deep impression on me.) 1 also practice Tai Chi, and in my youth I did dance,
thus two thigh arts, if you will.

RH: Yes, you even described rocks as thighs.

CV: Right. For me this symbolizes women's strength, right here (indicating her
lap), these muscles.

RH: And how are you particularly vicuna? I mean, you know, there is this old,
old association between vicunas, llamas, and song in the Andes and maybe that's
where the connections come from. In Guaman Poma's seventeenth-century
drawings, he sketches a scene in the plaza of the fiestas in Cuzco. The red-col­
ored llama is tied up loosely, affectionately, to a ceremonial stake in the plaza and
the llama and the Inca are singing together: "Eee. Eee."

B]I: Yes, in that drawing the words are inserted there right near their mouths, the
sounds coming right out of their mouths: "Eee."

CV: I've got to tell you about my vicuna experience. Until about a year ago, I had
never seen a vicuna. I made a special pilgrimage to see them and to know what
they're like. I went way beyond Arica; there's a lake called Chungara on the road
between Arica and La Paz about 4,000 meters above sea level. I ' m in this truck
and everyone else is fainting and in agony from the altitude. I beg the drivers to
let me stop and see some vicunas. And we get to a place where the vicunas are
grazing-right beside the road-and they don't pay any attention to us because
trucks go by here all the time.
So 1 beg the drivers: "Stop, please won't you stop so I can get out and look at
the vicunas." They say, "we can't stop, everybody is barely alive in here. No way,
no, no." "Ple-ea-ease stop," I said.
And so, sort of making fun of me they said, "You know when we stop the truck
they're all going to scatter, cavorting. It's easier said than done."
Then the truck comes to a halt and all the vicunas are all around, they start to
run, but I began to sing to them and . . . the vicunas stayed there to listen to me.
They didn't have the chance to sing back to me though because right then we
heard a loud BEEEEp BEEEp from the truck and we had to go on.

49
Billie J ea n Isbell and Regina Harrison

B]I: Too bad. Perhaps they would have sung "Eeee" back to you. Yo u were seduc­
ing them vvith your song. The alpacas, llamas, and certainly the vicunas too sing
like that when they're having sex.

RH: Good, you always know all these details. The big Galapagos turtles do, too;
I've heard them. What's the sound of the llamas making love?

BJI: The female puts her head like this up and stretches out and bleats "Eeeeee."

CV: C omplete l y happy.

BJI: Yes, re ally happy and singing.

( l aughter)

A S U BTERRANEAN LOGIC

BJI: Cecilia, one time you told me that you feel Andean in your blood, that your
essence is Andean. Can you explain your visions of how you have arrived at such
an identity? Do you think that your poetics are so full of Andean images and
metaphors because of the generations of blood? Or has Andean culture pene­
trated your blood line?

CV: I think that both things are true. On the one hand, I come from a long line
of descendants of a Basque family that came to Chile many generations ago. And
on my Mother's side, the Ramirez family was probably from Andalucfa. In these
two families, rather, there was probably a hidden indigenous presence even
though they claim there was no indigen ous ancestry at all; but I think that is
extremely unlikely. There is a presence of indigen ous blood that is not acknowl­
edged. And that is what I sense, feel. But, also, I was born in the country and
raised in an adobe house. I played in the irrigation ditches. My father was a
lavvyer who came home and planted corn. He believed that our lives had to be
integral , whole. We listened to the musics of the world, read diverse poetry, and
kept in touch with the earth.
C ulturally, a series of events took place in my family history that is very signifi­
cant. My great grandfather was a Chilean who was educated in France and
Europe . He even spoke Spanish badly When he returned to Santiago , he became
the first director of the Museo de Bellas Artes in Chile. He established this com­
pletely French Art Museum in the heart of Santiago located next to the Mapocho
river, which flows down from the Andes, as an exact copy of the Petit Palais in
France. His daughter, my grandmother Teresa, was a sculptor whose work was
completely occidental in the classical Greek style, but whose medium was clay.
Her daughter, my Aunt Rosa Vicuna, is a great sculptor who began to make con-

50
 M e t a p h o r S p u n : A Conversation

structivist sculptu res with indigenous themes. There is a dimension that is at

work here which involves the gradual Americanization of my family through the
influence of Andean culture. Furthermore, the transmission of this connection
with the American continent came through the women of my family.
If you ask, why has this happened in my family which is full of women artists?
Well, Santiago is full of wome1; artists also, but I am the only person who has
penetrated this language. The impression I have is that it all has to do with love
. . . love of the earth and water, of things I can touch, feel. When I was in Europe
for three years, I found that I was searching for a connection to the earth. I could
not find it but when I returned to South America, to Bogota, I threw myself face
down on the earth and kissed it. The earth has an energy, a vitality, in the
Americas that I don't feel elsewhere.
B]I: Fantastic! When I saw your performance at Cornell, I knew that your con­
nection to the earth and your feminine sensuality came from a long line of cre­
ative women. You say that you are a piece of yarn . . . you are the thread that is
connected to your matriliny. Now I have a new image of you as you lay your yarn
trails that connect us to the earth. For me, you confirm the theories of the femi­
nine symbolic of Luce Irigaray and Helene Cixous. Perhaps that is why women
see your work as a hopeful paradigm. Through sensuality and love, women have
a voice and language. Your poetic language expresses that. But what you say
about the Americanization of your family through your grandmother and your
aunt is extremely interesting because it is as if i n the American continent a fem­
inine symbolic and logic survived, whereas they were destroyed in Europe. In
the Andes, and I suspect that in many parts of the Americas, gender as an
abstract category is characterized by the feminine as the unmarked category and
the masculine as marked. The Americanization of your family that you speak of
expresses that feminine symbolic. I've always wondered about the connection to
the earth in your poetry In anthropology, we write about the animate nature of
the earth in the Andes, the sacred places which have individual personalities and
characters. The earth, stone, water, mountains speak, they all have particular
voices of their own. Perhaps this is similar to what you are perceiving about the
American earth. Certainly, other American native cultures attribute such proper­
ties to the earth as welL Your poetry is so full of metaphors and images that speak
to this sensibility.
CV: Yes, and I think that is why my work is very often intelligible to peasants and
humble people who feel these connections whereas my work is often not intelligi­
ble to urbanites who have experienced a kind of intellectual colonization. As you
well know from your work, among peasants you find very sophisticated minds, or
in other words, sophistication or simplemindedness are to be found equally in the
city or the mountains. For example, a young Chilean man, a literary critic, wrote

51
Billie Jean Isbell and Regina Harrison

that in order to rea d Guaman Poma, you had to read Roland Barthes first.
I magin e !

BJT: Well, years ago, I read Guaman Poma in the Andes with Quec hua-speaking
women. J read the text and showed th em the drawing which des c ribes how
women tied up all the dogs and beat them so they would "cry" and then the
wo men, also crying, sang and p layed their drums for rain. The women siid, oh,
years ago we used to do that and described the same ritual.

RH: No news to them, ri ght?

B]l: Righ t, and they loved the drawings.

CV: But you know, where I grew up in the country side o utside of Santi ago, no
one knew Quechua or Mapuche, and the i ndigen ous cultures were not so appar­
ent. It is far more subtle than that.
Even though so much of the cultures have been destroyed through colonialism,
people still hear the chants of water, the songs of the animals, the whispers of the
earth. Once my work was shown in s l ides and read ings in Cochabamba, Bolivia,
and the director of the art institute said that local people, peasants, migrants
crowded the room where my art was being shown and kept asking that it be
repeated. My work spoke to them. There is a subterranean logic that allows them
to understand my art. They understand the fertility of words, the sensual cogni ­
tion that I am communicating.

BJI: I like that . . . subterranean logic . . . fertility of words.

THE FERTILTTY o F WoRDS

RH: I n one part of your latest book you quote Octavio Paz's words: " I don ' t see
with my eyes: words are my eyes."

CV: That reminds me of what my Mother saii.d to me as a child: "My dear daugh­
ter, your eyes aren't in your fingertips " She was trying to bring me up properly
in Chilean society where it is not proper to tou ch evet1'thing . But on the other
hand , she was a sensual person herself, my Mother.

RH: It seems that you and Paz share some of the same thoug hts and the same
gaze. And o f course you even share the same translator, Eliot Weinberger, too.

CV: For us Paz was a real guru in the sixties. Rea ding Paz in th ose years was a
revelation, bringi ng us the phi losophi cal world of India. He was a trans mitter of
the ideas of the surrealists. Really, I read him-1 i ntensely read him-in that
moment of my li fe. I am aware of hi s influence on me at that time; he was like a

52
 M e t a p h o r Spun: A Conversation

commissure [anatomical word to denote the corner of the eyelid]. He pretty

much \.vraps up everything for me about that period of time.

RH: That was his politically activist period, too, the sixties.

CV: Exactly, all of us in the sixties took a political stand. [ had founded a "tribe"
in Santiago, a tribe that was called the "No Tribe." Since we weren't a tribe I
believed it was best to call us the "No Tribe"; I wrote the non-manifesto for the
"No Tribe" and in one of our political gatherings we read the poem that Paz
wrote about the massacre in Tlatelolco, so you see we were in tune with Paz in
this. We said NO to the world in its present state and YES to life. NO to Pinochet
and YES to life. I think it's another case of Andean insistence, a way of speaking
negatively, of reversals. Because speaking al reves [reversing things] is an Andean
practice that mestizos have perfected. For instance, when I lived in Bogota, I
always passed by a senora who spent all her time sitting there selling little corn
things to eat and when I spoke to her, "How are you, dona Marfa," she'd say, "Just
sitting here sunbathing." You see, it was night and she spoke o f asoletindome, sun­
ning herself under the stars.

RH: Your struggles with "wording" differ dramatically from those of Paz. I'm
thinking of the violence expressed in his ars poetica, the poem called "\Vords"
where he says:

spin them around

grab them by the tail (screech, whores)
whip them . . .
dry them out
castrate them
step all over them.
(RH's translation)

Your verbs express another attitude, such as here when you write about words:

they wait
surging in silence
one hundred times touched
and changed
exhausted for a moment
and then revived.

Here it's not a question of the strength of expression-or even a male or female
thing-but in his case the poet's will to control and confront those enunciations
we call poetry. Here it's a desire to trap words, grab them and punish them until
they yield to his meaning.

53
Billie Jean Isbell and Regina Harrison

Meanwhile, look at the verbs with which you envelop the creative act: words
that wait, words that liminall)i exist, perhaps exhausted, they are nurtured to life
again by your, well, I'd say your slow hand, your patience.
CV: My dealing with words is different . . . more than anything what Billie Jean
has said is precisely what happened when I had words appear to me as riddle/rev­
elation. The first to appear was the word enamorados . . . the two in love or a� in Jill
Levine's term "of love, livid." I can show you that from the first moment I wrote
it down there's an insistence in the loving . . . in the eroticism, even in oriri, for
instance, and you commented on that, Bill�e Jean. Now it sends chills up and
down me to think of the coherence between my feelings and Andean culture. I
was Andean culture, I was living i t before really knowing it, prefiguring it in my
imagination, but I didn't know it then.
B]I: You were feeling the power of the feminine in Andean culture, the surge of
the erotic.
RH: Are you talking about your etymological verses? They're very different from
the rootedness in the earth that is expressed in some of your other work. The
PALABRARmas series seems to express a very cerebral orientation to the world.

CV: Rather interesting that you call it cerebral, because poetry began in a vision­
ary way for me. I was young, seventeen years old, and I lived in Santiago, at the
foot of the Andes, right there facing El Plomo. El Plomo is the chief apu [lord,
Andean deity] of the whole valley of Santiago . . . it's so huge you can see it loom­
ing up from many distant valleys. We lived there right in front of this cordillera
and one night I was in my room just looking at the stars, lots of times I even slept
outside to see them better. Suddenly I had the feeling that a word just came into
my field of sight, a word almost like a person. And this word began to open up,
to show me its inner parts, and it began to dance: en-amor-ados . . . en amor ena­
jenados [in love, in love lividly).
In this one night some sixty riddles appeared and appeared and appeared. So,
many years later when I began to really "discover" etymologies, I made a connec­
tion between my sighting of the riddles which is completely Andean but in this
moment I didn't know it. I just knew it was important but I didn't know how to
place it, to position it. That understanding came to me when I was living in Europe,
many years later, in a text by Rene Daumal the surrealist poet, where he describes
the importance of etymological reflections in Sanskrit poetry. It was through read­
ing that text by Damna! that I understood and valued what I was doing. So, I began
researching linguistics and etymologies. Much later, when I had published lots of
these things, I found Robert Randall's article about the possibility of an Incan sys­
tem of doing the same thing I do-finding the etymologies that are not really a pre­
cise etymology but a "poetic" etymology. I wanted to give this some depth and I

54
 Metaphor S p u n : A Conversation

embarked on \.vriting a philosophy of lang uage but from a poetic orientation. And
.

then I made this poetic connection that it's uncanny that this happened at the foot
of E l Plomo because El Plomo is the southernmost high place, the foremost altar
of altars. Twenty years later, how strange that this riddling experience is tied up
with the mountain. Because from the first, l had a connection with that mountain .

B]I: How fascinating that you perceived that experience as riddles becoming cor­
poreal in your field of vision. As you know, l discovered that young Andean
women challenge young men at riddle competitions called "Putting Your Life out
to Pasture" and that, more often than not, the women "win" the verbal competi­
tions. The name of the game is to create clever verses that follow poetic ety­
mologies, creating word images with novel associations. As the game proceeds,
sometimes the verses are set to music and dance. But the culmination of the
game is to engage in competitive group sex-to have sex with everyone of the
opposite sex that you are not related to through kinship or compadrazgo . And
guess what, the young women win at that, too! Women celebrate their new intel­
lectual skills combined with the realization of sexual prowess. There is a very old
Andean belief that women, and especially female identities, must be sexually
excited before the performance o f fertility rituals. You were discovering your sen­
suality, sexuality, and the fertility of words.

CV: When I read your essay, Billie Jean, now that I'm in my forties, you can imag­
in e my delight in findi n g that cul tu ral trace. Because when I vvrot e down my rid­
dles, J showed them to my C hi lean friends and they all looked at me like, "this is
ridiculous, what does it mean?" I kept on thinking it was important, they didn't.
And when I read your article I found out I u nderstoo d, really underst ood this
connection of entering and coming out of the earth and words, and the relation­
ship of seeds, all that was in what you wrote.

B]I: Too bad that you didn't have an opportunity to compete in the riddling
games when you were seventeen years old. You would have been a champion'

RH: As we talk about words and seeds and flowers I remember that you quote
"flor es Ia palabra flor." What does this mean for you, perhaps along the sense of
Vicente Huidobro s manifesto?
'

CV: \Veil, Huidobro's so obvious I d idn't want to get into him, he ordered the
poets to "make that flower flower in your poem. It's more of an ideologi cal ques­
"

tion, a poetic principle that I was already reading when I was very little. But what
l found in ]oao Cabral de Melo Neto's "flor es Ia palabra flor" was already com­
plete, accomplished, it's just right for what I ' m feeling. And afterwards, I found
Ernesto Fenollosa who said "ya el sol era un sol" [the word sun was a sun] and
that's my poetic insistence in regard to culture, that the very word is my expression.

55
Billie Jean Isbell and Regina Harrison

Like in your book, Regina, in the Quechua verb unanchani [to make signs and
understand and to enunciate it prophetically], there are three meanings in one
verb. After finding this out, I said, this is strange because this has been my experi­
ence. The three things . . . people find in the same source different expression, par­
tial expressions, it's like meaning in the ponchos and in verbal expressions.

B]I: In ponchos and in other weavings as well as in the riddles, the meanings are
there if you can "see" them or, better, if you can trace the thread and make the
connections.
RH: Cecilia, your poem "Poncho" is one of your best poems of Andean-ness, close
to one of my favorite poems, a traditional Quechua poem from the Cuzco region
that I use in teaching. 1 haven't found the original Quechua version to read that to
you, so for now we only have the version Mark Strand worked on h·om the Spanish:

I wanted a llama
with a golden coat
bright as the sun,
strong as love,

soft as clouds
unravelled by dawn,
in order to make

a knotted rope
for keeping track
of moons that pass,
of flowers that die.2

RH: In your poem "Poncho" the Andean-ness is not just of images but of texture
in your expression. And it's even more special to see you capture this yourself in
this poem, because you are now jumping across languages and cultures, by writ­
ing this poem directly in English:

they say wooly animals

are born high in the
mountain springs

water and fiber

are one

wool and cotton

downy fiber
an open hand
the poncho

56
 M e t a p h o r Spun: A Conversation

is a book
a woven
message

a metaphor
spun

CV: Well, it was just scary to write in English. I had an idea I'd just do it because
Eliot didn't have time to translate it and I thought I'll just rough it out and Eliot
can smooth it out later. But he liked my rough translation and I've done some
more in English, but I always consider it an act of emergency that I nave to do
and can't get out of it.

B]I: Your "act of emergency" is similar to what we have to do in anthropology to

translate a culture. Perhaps you captured the most apt image for translating
Andean culture . . "a metaphor spun."

BI8LIOGM.PHY:

HARRISON, Regina. 'The Language and the Rhetoric of Conversion in the Viceroyalt)' of Peru." Poetics Today,
1 6 1 (Spring 1995): 1-29
- Signs, Songs (llld Memory in the Andes: Tran.slnting Quecltua Language and Culture . Austin: University of
Texas Press, 1989.
- "The Quechua Oral Tradition: From Waman Poma to Contemporary Ecuador." Review: Centerfor Inter­
American Relations 28 (January·April 1981): 19-22.

ISBELL, Billie Jean. "lnmaduro a Duro: Lo Simb6lico Femenino y los Esqucmas Andinos de Genera." In Mas
Alla del Silen.cio: Las Fronteras del
Gene ro en los Andes, ed. D.Y. Arnold and A. Spedding, 267-3 14. La Paz:
ILCA and Institute of Amerindian Swdies, Artes Graficas. English version in press: "From Unripe to
Petrified: The Feminine Symbolic in Andean Gender Schema. In Maki"g Cultme and History in the Andes.
Ed. Billie Jean Isbell. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997.
-To Defend Otmelves: Ecology and Ritual in an Andean Village. Prospect Heights: Waveland Press, 1985.
- "The Ontogenesis of Metaphor: Riddle Games among Quechua Speakers Seen as Cognitive Discovery
Procedures." journal of Latin American Lore 3 . 1 ( 1977): 19-49.

S1'RANO, Mark. 18 Poems from the Quechua. Cambridge, Mass.: Halty Ferguson, 197 I .

NoTE:

I . Mark Strand, "Pastoral," /8 Poems from the Queclma (Cambridge, Mass.: Hairy Ferguson, 1971).
Reprinted by permission of the author.

57
Salter's Island, Maine, 1985. Photo: Cesar Paternosto.
 CRYPTIC WEAVING

Hugo Mendez-Ramirez

p rom antiquity, and especially since the romantic movements in Europe and
Latin America, poets have dealt with the elusiveness of language, questioning
its effectiveness to represent the reality of human existence. Such Hispanic poets
as Gustavo Adolfo Becquer, Juan Ramon Jimenez, Pedro Salinas, Jorge Guillen,
Jorge Luis Borges, and Vicente Huidobro have all expressed at one point or
another their skepticism toward language. Few poets have maintained their faith
in the power of language to create or transform realily. One of these is the
Mexican poet Octavia Paz. Another is the Chilean poet Cecilia Vicuna. But while
Paz's poetic convictions are rooted in a profound knowledge of Oriental philoso­
phies, Vicuna's trust in the power of language is the result of an ongoing inquiry
into the intricate complexities of Andean languages and their poetic tradition.
Another preoccupation of Latin American writers has long been the need to sat­
isfy a desire for identity and the search for an appropriate artistic form to express
the American experience. Andres Bello, Pablo Neruda, Nicanor Parra, Ernesto
Cardenal, and others have written poems that aspire to create the American myth,
an American "supreme fiction."' Cecilia Vicuna's work is part of this search. Her
work is as much a return to a tradition as it is the creation of a new one embed­
ded in the old one, a "literature of foundations," to use Octavio Paz's phrase.2 She
is one of the few \.vriters who have moved closer to a reconciliatory dialogue
between the European and Amerindian cultures. At the same time, Vicuna's poet­
ry is in the best symbolist tradition of poets like Ruben Darfo, Manuel Gonzalez
Martfnez (and Paz), as well as the metaphysical vein found in Borges and Jose

59
Hugo Mendez-Ramirez

Lezama Lima. To confront Vicuna's source is a futile task, since her work reveals
one of the most diverse and eclectic approaches to poetry. Nevertheless, one can
clearly identify connections, especially with Chilean poetry.
Although her work has received little critical attention, Vicuna is one of the
most protean and talented Latin American artists today.' Borrowing themes and
techniques from both Western and Amerindian models, Vicuna creates he� own,
singular, artistic universe, a collage of old and new forms. Tn this postmodern era,
her work is a unique synthesis of the artistic traditions of Europe, Latin America,
and the ancient noncanonical heritage of Andean poetry. Although certain fun­
damental themes permeate her entire work, each one of her books concentrates
on a vision or specific reflection on the poetic task, which allows us, then, to
coherently trace Vicuna's artistic trajectory. I have considered here only those
texts that have clearly been turning points in the author's artistic evolution.
Sabor a m.{ ( 1 973) is her first published book. (There is, according to the author,
an earlier book that was censored in the late sixties and has never been printed.)
In any case, Sahor a m{ is an early work that brings together, as its editor and trans­
lator Felipe Ehrenberg says, "celebraciones y melancolfas de algo que fue y no pudo
seguir siendo" (Sabor a mf ) (celebrations and melancholies of something that was
and could not continue being).' It is a shout of protest, an accident in the cosmos,
as was the coup d'etat. Its objective, says the author herself, was to create a magic
work, a revolutionary work, and an aesthetic work (in that order). For me, the most
salient aspect of this text is its value as a testimonial or a chronicle of the
announced coup d'etat. (There had been a frustrated attempt on June 2, 1973.)
The book is an enunciation, months prior, of the eminence of the coup-of being
"al filo del agua"-on the edge of disaster. But the world preferred silence; in those
years even the CIA's participation was denied. Technically, the book offers, even at
this early stage of Vicuna's career, glimpses of the use of combinaciones elocutivas,
which characterize almost all her work. Eduardo Benot develops this concept of
combinaciones elocutivas or constniCCiOt-zes elocutivas in his book El arte de hablar.
For Benot, the science of speech is found, not in isolated words, but rather in the
"combinaci6n de palabras y Ia combinaci6n de combinaciones" (combination of
words and the combination of combinations) (Benot 17).
Precario, the second important book, is centered around the mysterious inner
power of (in)significant objects, and their connection with nature and human
life. The "performance events," as she calls them, included in the book, are col­
lages made of natural rubbish, strings, and refuse, and are clearly linked to that
variety of dadaism invented by Kurt Schwitters called Merz. Regarding one of
these events, Hudson River, Vicuna says the following: "I launched boats on the
river, talking to it. Changing signs, mine and those there by chance. The boats
and the trash, mingling" (Unravelling 23). However, while these events can be
said to have roots in Merz, a European model, the poetry of this book is also con-

60
 Cryptic We aving

nected with the American tradition of Neruda's Odas elementales or Nicanor

Parra's antipoetry. Vicuna's conception of the poet as an interpreter or medium
through which the sacred voice of the ancient past can be heard finds an imme­
diate precedent in Neruda's Alturas de Macchu Picchu. I n the initial poem of the
book, "Entrando" (Entering), the poetic speaker concludes on a didactic note:

En el antiguo Perl'1 el adivino trazaba lfneas de polvo

en Ia tierra, como una forma de adivinar, o dejar que
lo divino hable en el.
(Precario)
(In ancient Peru the diviners traced lines of dust
·in the earth, as a way of divining, or letting
the divine to speak them.)
(Prec.1rio)

Strings or scraps of cloth contain hidden messages or powerful secrets. They

become bridges between the present and the past, or artifacts for recovering lost
memory:

the poncho
is a book
a woven
message
(wri.tten in English, Unravelling 13)

Art is therefore the act of connecting or uniting that which apparently has no
relationship.
If the collage was the ideal solution to a purely aesthetic problem for cubist
painting, in Vicuna's work the collage is the result of the poet's aspiration to unite
the most disparate of elements. For this reason, the metaphor becomes her prin­
cipal poetic tool, because of its ability to connect dissimilar entities and objects.

La metafora !leva a otro espacio de contemplaci6n:

con templar nos templa juntos
o templa simultaneamente lo interior y exterior.
(Precario)
(Metaphor takes us to another space of contemplation;
to contemplate temples us together, or tem.ples
simultaneously the interior and the exterior. )
(Precari.o)

Vicuna's originality lies not only in her successful adaptation of the Incas' oral
poetry to European forms and vice versa, but also in the inclusion of her own per­
sonal experiences with the women of the Andean region and her knowledge of

61
Hugo M e n d e z - R a m irez

different indigenous cultures and languages. Quechua or Nahuatl intermingle

with Asian and Western languages, creating a confusion of their apparent differ­
ences: "confundir es fundir juntos [(con)fundir]" (Precario) (to confuse is "to
pour together" (UnraveUing 1 1 ]), says Vicuna. Shaman, for her, is "he who ties ."

textile, text, context

from teks: to weave .

sutra: sacred Buddhist text

thread (Sanskrit)
tantra: sacred text derived from the Vedas: thread

ching: as in Tao te Ching . . .

sacred book: warp

Quechua: the sacred language

derived from q'eswa:
rope or cord made of straw
(Unravelling 1 0)'

PALABRA.Rmas, published in Argentina in 1984, goes a step further in exploring the

privileged relationship of the poet with language and the process of poetic creation.
I n the anthologized edition, a line from the Chilean poet Vicente Huidobro serves
as an epigraph: "Open your mouth and receive the host of the wounded word"
(Unravelling 25) 6 In this book, Vicuna establishes, on the one hand, most convinc­
ingly the autonomy of language, and, on the other, the romantic vision of the poet
as someone who has access to the truth. Therefore we can see the poet serving as a
kind of midwife who helps humanity be reborn within the consciousness of being.
Her poetic creed is defined in a direct reference to Martin Heidegger, who main­
tained that "[t]he nature of poetry . . . is the founding of truth" (Unravelling 47).

VERDAD

DAR VER

VERDADERA

ES DADORA DE VER

(truth:
to give sight

truthful:
giver of sight)
(Unravelling 46 )'

62
 Cryptic We a v i n g

Thus she engages in an obsessive quest for the ancient meanings of words, sub­
merging herself in an etymological labyrinth and discovering that palabras
(words) are in fact combinations of other combinations, or as we noted earlier
combinaciones elocutivas. Vicu na attempts to em ulate Hatunsimi:

el lenguaje principal [que] usa palabras arcaicas de muchos significados,

palindromes [sic] y prestamos de otros idiomas.
(Wik'una 85)
(the principal language {that} uses archaic words with many meanings,
palindromes and borrowings from other languages. )

One of the most important aspects of this book, and indeed of all her work, is
the process of the dissecti n g of language into sem an tic units, in an attempt to
give back to every word its archaic meaning, its power as an instrument for
acquiring �isdom and knowledge.

A word is divine: internally divided.

Its inner division creates its ambigui ty, the inner tension that makes growth
and association possible.
(Unravelling 3 5)

Poems (words) become artifacts to create "adivinanzas" ("divinations"), or rather,

epiphani c experiences:

Ia palabra es la adivinanza
y adivinar
es averiguar lo divino.
(PALABRARmas 17)

(the word is the divination; to divine is to ascertain the divine.)

(Unravelling 34)

PALABRARmas, the title of the book, is formed of pala (shovel) and abra (open, used
as a command), palabra (word), of labrar (to work), armar (to arm or to assemble)
and other words. For Vicu na, "To work words as one works the land is to work more;
to think of what the work does is to arm yourself with the vision of words. And more:
words are weapons, perhaps the only acceptable weapons" (Unravelling 27).
The poems of this collection are a collage of verses, aphorisms, direct quotes
of philosophers, poets, critics, translators, and linguists, taken from books as
diverse as the Bible, the Popol Vuh, the Rig Veda, as well as from etymo logical dic­
tionaries-in fact, Vicuna's p rincipal source here is Joan C oromin as '
Etymological Dictionary. The end result is a system of rational support that facil­
itates the reader's access to, in Vicuna's words, "a vision in which individual
words [open] to reveal their inner associations, allowin g ancient and newborn

63
Hugo Mende z - R a m irez

metaphors to come to light"; and, ultimately, access to the revelation, or

epiphany, the divination. Here, Vicuna, like Borges, embarks on an encounter
with the ancient metaphors contained in the word itself, since,
Ia palabra condensa Ia creaci6n
en su metafora interior.
(PALA8RAJimas 70)
(the word condenses creation
in its interior metaphor. )
If in the origin of literature there are mythologies and legends, metaphors are
the degre zero of language. Like Huidobro and the vanguard poets, Vicuna affirms
once again the supremacy of the metaphor because of its ability to go beyond the
most complex forms of comparison, because of its capacity for suggestion: a pon­
cho is a book, a woven message. However, to the privilege that the vanguard writ·
ers give the metaphor, Vicuna adds the immanent vision that she learned from
the Andean women of Peru.
Cada palabra
aguarda al viajero
que en ella
espera hallar
senderos y soles
del pensar.
( PALABRARmas 1 1 )
(Each word
awaits the traveler
hoping to find
in her
trails and suns
of thought. )
(Unravelling 3 1 )

Words, animals, and objects, all share the vital dynamic of human beings. I n
sharing the same plane of existence, it becomes possible to achieve true com­
munion between the poet, language, and nature. Vicuna's poetic vision lacks the
transcendent and hierarchical order of Huidobro's creacionismo, which places the
poet in the role of a semi-god who gives life to the poem; instead, a sensual rela­
tionship is established between the poet and words. Words become "cuerpos
celestes I cada u na I en su movimiento (u 6rbita)" (PALABRARmas 12) (celestial
bodies I each one I in its movement [or orbit]) that seduce the poet within the
" es pacio I a] que I compenetramos" (space I to which I we compenetrate) and

make the poet ask if "aman elias nuestra labor I . . . Lo desean I como nosotros I

64
 Cryptic We a v i n g

Palabrarmas, London, 1974.

a elias" ( 1 3) (they love our labor I . . . They desire it I as we I them). Such a vision
in fact corresponds more to Octavio Paz's poetic creed, when he maintains that
reality "recognizes itself in the imagining of poets-and poets recognize their
imaginings in reality. Our dreams are waiting for us around the corner" (Paz 178).
Vicuna conceives of language as immanent, pantheistic, not transcendent.
Poetry, in its metaphorical power, becomes the source of existence, in the same
way that the word in the J udeo-Christian tradition is the source of life:

Una metafora lleva a otra

y I a eficacia poetica
es Ia (mica garantfa
de la reproducci6n.
(PALABRARmas 70}
(One metaphor leads to another
and effective poetry
is the only guarantee
of reproduction.)

In Vicuna's poet1y, as in the works of Paz and Borges, there is a constant effort to
find a direct correspondence between word and object:

La palabra crea al ser y es creada por el

en un misterio del que s6lo tenemos las claves
para hacerlo crecer.
( PALABRARnUIS 66)
(The word creates the being or is created by it
in a mystery of which we only have the h.eys
to make it grow.)

65
Hugo Mendez-Ramirez

Paradoxjcally or consequently, depending on one's point of view, this conception

of the word as the source of all existence coincides precisely with the strongest
Judeo-Christian tradition, and with the concept of transcendentalism. Toward
the end of the book the following passage from the Book of John appears: "En el
principio era el Verbo y el Verbo era con Dios, y el Verbo era Dios" (PALABRARma.s
82) (in the beginning was the \Nord and the Word was with God, and thy Word
was God), but only in order to connect it or confound it with other texts of imma­
nent fo und ations such as the Popol Vuh or the Rig Veda, because the beginning
of existence is found in the word.

La eq ui-valencia entre esto s y otros textos,

<_que dice?
<_Somos uno solo pensando, en mil expresiones distintas
y c onvergentes a Ia vez?
<_0 un conocimiento antiguo, suprim ido y olvidado
resucita en el pensamiento poetico de todas las
epocas?
(PALABRARmas 84)
(The equating of these and many other texts,
what does it signify?
Are we one singular being thinbng, in a thousand expressions at once
different and convergent?
Or does an ancient knowledge, suppressed and forgotten,
revive in the poet·ic thought of all the ages?)

Vicuna suggests that, once we go beyond the surface of words and enter their
etymologies, we discover that the languages and cosmogonies of many cultures
are intertwined. The memory of this connection disappears when language loses
its capacity to communicate this fundamental essence, when the correspondence
and cohesion between the name and that which is named is broken. Vicuna
describes this rupture between the signifier and the signified with the words of
Ernest Fenollosa, for whom:
. . . Ia anemia del habla moderna
proviene de Ia debil fuerta cohesiva de n uestros
sfmbolos foneticos, que ya no transparentan
las metaforas que les dieron Iugar.
( PALABRARnulS 87)
. . . (the anemia of modem speech
derivesfrom the wealz cohesive force of our
phonetic symbols, which no longer allow the
metaphors that gave rise to them to be seen. )

66
 C ry p t ic vVe aving

La Wik'una, the most recent of her major works, is also the most mature and
most cryptic of the three. As in the previous book, the introductory epigraph
taken from Lezama Lima is revealing: "La luz es el primer animal visible de lo
invisible" (Light is the first visible animal of the invisible). In effect, the poetic
vision of this book shares the metaphysical conception of the Cuban writer's
poetry, according to which the poetic text should produce epiphanies, revela­
tions, or in Vicuna's terminology, adivinanzas (divinations ) . Here the poems are
like ritual acts, powerful mantras that cast a spell over nature or human life in
order to influence the unfolding of future events.
Vicuna's project is even more ambitious than that of Neruda, who in Canto
general at tempted to become the messianic or prophetic voice who would achieve
redemption of the oppressed America. Vicufia is not interested in the prophetic
power of the word, but rather in the ACTIVE POWER of the word when it is uttered
by the singer; she is interested in its cosmic force. This is the root of the great
process of experimentation that shaped the earlier books, for each word's mystery
and power is revealed to us only in uniting, in connecting. Precario was the dis­
covery of the secret forces contained in (in)significant objects, PALABRARrnas
explores the philosophical and linguistic foundation of her poetic vision (or dis­
covery), and this last book is the actual performance of the poetry's power. It is
centered around the complex ritual process and its elements, involving the sacred
animals of the Inca, the ceremonial centers of Peru, or the natural ingredients
used by the shaman in the execution of ritual ceremonies.

Watuq, el chaman es "el que amarra", de

watuy, amarrar.

Wa�unasimi, el lenguaje tejido crea eJ

mundo en oraculos, parabolas y adivinanzas.
(Wik'una 85)
(Watuq, the shaman is "he who ties," from
watuy, to tie.

Watunasimi, the woven language creates the

world in oracles, parables and divinations.)
(Unravelling 102)

Vicuna's poetry, especially here, like that of the Inca, is designed for collective
use and is written to be sung in the open air, in nature. This is similar to the
Andean tradition of singing described by Regina Harrison, a no ted anthropolo­
gist and specialist in Andean culture, and an important source for Vicuna. She
states in her Signs, Songs and Memory in the Andes that durin g the harvest "the
singing i s communal and public, and the songs are passed down from generation
to generation by men who have the strength to sing and work from dawn to

67
Hugo M e n d e z - R amirez

dusk" (Harrison 22). The continuing search is centered around these songs and
their oral performance because in them is preserved the ancient sense and
meaning of the language, which still remains for us cryptic and hermetic.�
Hence, the vision projected in this book is that of a universe profoundly rooted
in the beliefs and myths of the indigenous American cultures. For this reason,
the frequent use of prosopopeia is not a mere rhetorical device in Vicufia\book,
but rather the exact expression of this particular view of the world. In the first
poem, "lridesce," light desires and seeks the soft rays of the sun, and even "(e]l
mismo brillo I sabe pensar" (Wii�'UJ1a 12) (the brightness itself I knows how to
think). According to Harrison, for the Quechua, "things are not statically
described but are seen as things in movement which recombine to make new
wholes in meaningful juxtaposition" (30). This clarifies the dynamic and chang­
ing character of all Vicuna's work. The poem is not seen as a final artifact, but
as a continuous process of renovation and reconfiguration. The text, like living
creatures, is a changeable entity that reconstitutes itself as it moves through
time and space. This explains also the radical changes found in, for instance, an
earlier edition and a more recent one.
In her attempt to revitalize language, to remove it from its anemic state, nouns
(static) frequently become verbs (dynamic), thus acquiring life and will, body
and soul. The noun humo (smoke), for example, becomes active in the invented
verb humar (to smoke). Words, says Vicuna, want to speak. " Espe ran silentes I
y cantarinas I . . . I agotadas por un instante I y vueltas a despertar" (PALABRAR­
mas 1 1- 1 2) (They await, quiet I and singing / . . . I exhausted for a moment I and
awakened again). A hummingbird ("Tentenelaire Zun Zun," Wik'una 17)
becomes a metaphor for poetry, and vice versa.

El poema
es el animal
Hundiendo
Ia boca
En el manantial.
(Wilt'u.i'ia I 9)
(The poem
is the animal
Sinking
its mouth
ln the spring.)

In the poem "Wik'ufia," a reference to the totemic animal of the poet, who lends
its name to the book, the identification between creature and poet is so strong
that their entities are (con)fused:

68
 Cryp tic Weav i ng

Amanecer
del amar siendo
el animal.
(Wik'mia 22)
(Anima.l
rising
from our love.)
(Unravelling 83)

In the poem "Humar," the speaker, like the singer celebrating the ritual act,
achieves a moment of complete transmutation in the sacred smoke:

Canto
en despliego
Y en humo
me voy
(Unravelling 1 1 6)
(Song
tmcurving

I go up in smoke)
(Unravelling 117)

Another aspect that distinguishes this book from the earlier works is its struc­
ture. The lines and strophes are shorter, in the style of the Japanese haiku, or
emulating Andean rhythmic song patterns. Regular rhyme and a certain formal
symmetry appear for the first time, as does a new emphasis on capturing and
reproducing the speech of the Andean women singers: "Humoso fecundo I ponte
palla" (Wik'ttna 43) (Fecund smoke I go that way).
This is a new attempt to achieve a true hybrid language, which will serve as
another way of connecting or reconciling the pre-Hispanic heritage with the
Western European tradition. A good example of this linguistic collage is "Unuy
Quita," which means in Quechua "Tus muy lindas aguas" (Your most beautiful
waters). The original Andean poem is a four-syllable song, whose sound repro­
duces the sound of water falling among rocks. In Vicuna's version, this water, in
a Borgesian sense, is all waters at once.

Pacha pacarina
esfera y turbi6n

Una sola eres

Aguaa

69
Hugo M e n d e z - R a m irez

Meandro
tu kenko
[ . . . . . ]
Chichita
Challando

Splasha jugando
(Wilt'wia 3 7)
( Pacha Pacarina
flashfood sphere

You are one

Waterrr

Z.igzag 1neander
[. . . . . . ]
Chicha gone
around the bend

Playing splashing)
(Unravelling I 05}

There is thus a return to the predominant theme of the union and similarity of
objects and words, but expressed and sustained now in conventional poetic
forms. Not only are these poems more hermetic than the earlier ones, but they
have also been elaborated, worked out with great precision, with a more rich and
expressive language, and in her own genuine voice.
Vicuna's great confidence in the power of language leads her to place the wis­
dom and knowledge of the ancient past in a dialogic confrontation with contem­
porary politics and the apocalyptic fate of Western civilization, in the hope that
the former wi!J save the latter. "Sooner or later," she says, "we will reach the con­
sciousness of word-working, the shared knowledge that until now injustice and
exploitation have impeded" (Unravelling 60). In precisely this constant juxtapo­
sition of apparently disparate elements, Vicuna is one of a very few who have
been able to find a harmonious balance between ancient and contemporary
forms, between European and American origins, between the schemes of indige­
nous languages and modern poetic inquiries.

70
 Cryptic Weavi n g

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BENOT, Eduardo. Arte de habla,·: Cramdtica filos6fictJ de l.a lengua castelltma. Madrid: Librerfa de los suce­
sores de J fernando, 1910.
BIANCHI, Soledad. "Pasaron desde aquel ayer ya tantos anos, o acerca de Cecilia Vicuna y Ia Tribu No. "
Hispamerica Ji.Sl ( 1 988): 88-94.
GoNzALEZ EcHEVERRIA, Roberto. "Introduction" to Canto General by Pablo Neruda. Trans. Jack Schmitt.
Berkeley: U niversity of California Press, 1991.
HARRISON, Regina. Signs, Songs, and Memory in the Andes. Translating Quechrw Language and Culture.
Austin: University of Texas Press, 1989.
MENDEZ-RAMIREZ, Hugo. Review of Unravelling Words and the Weaving of IMHer by Cecilia Vicuna. Review:
Latin American Literature and A1'ts 48 ( 1994): 96-98.
MILLER, James. The American Qu.est. for a Supreme Fiction. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. !9i9.
PAZ, Octavio. "A Literawre of Foundations," in The Siren and the Seashell, and Otl>er Esst1ys Oll Poet')' and
Poetics. Trans. Lysander Kemp and Margaret Sayers Peden. Austin: University of Texas Press, l9i6.
V1cU�A, Cecilia. PALABRARm.as. Buenos Aires: El imaginero. 1984.
-Precario!PreCCirious. Trans. Anne Twitty. New York: Tanam Press, 1983.
-Sabor a mi. Trans. Felipe Ehrenberg. Devon, England: Beau Geste Press, J 973.
-Unravelling Words and tite Weaving of Wat.er. Trans. Eliot Weinberger and Suzanne Jill Levine. Ed. and
intro. Eliot Weinberger. St. Paul, Minn.: Gra}�wolf Press, 1992.
-La Wih'IHta. Santiago, Chile: Francisco Zegers Editor, 1990.

NOTES:

l . James E. Miller, following Wallace Stevens, develops this concept in his The American Q ..est for a
Supreme Fiction. Roberto Gonzalez Echeverria explains this idea as follows: "Such a m)•th or fiction is
about origins, about tradition, or, more to the point, about the lack of origins or t1·aditions" (Introduction to
Neruda's Canto General). See Bibliography at end of chapter.
2. Paz affirms that "Spanish American literature, which is rootless and cosmopolitan, is both a return and a
search for tradition. In searching for it, it invents it. But invention and discovery are not terms that best
describe its purest creations. A desire for incarnation, a literature of foundations" (Paz 179).
3. A few reviews, commentaries and scattered short notes about specific works have been published in var·
ious countries. The first attempt to treat Vicuna's entire work in a single article is that of the Chilean pro­
fessor Soledad Bianchi. Her essay, published i n Hisj?am.ririca in 1988 is useful, especially for understand­
ing Vicuna's formative years in Chile. Eliot Weinberger's introduction to the recent bilingual anthology,
Unravell.ing Words and the Weaving of Water, helps to illuminate the anthologized texts. My own commen·
tary in Re11i.<.YJII: Latin American Literature and Arts attempts to elucidate Vicuna's poetic work within the
context of Latin American literary history.
4. All translations are by Vialia Hartfield-Mendez, except passages from Weinberger and Levine's bilingual
anthology, Unravelling Words and the Weaving of Vl4lter, and passages from Precario!Precarious, tr3nslated by
Anne Twitty.
5. The poem "The Origin ofWelwing," from a series titled "Five Notebooks for Exit Art," in the anthology pub­
lished by Graywolf Press, was originally written in English and included, or added to, the Precarios section.
6. In the original edition there are two epigraphs, one from Brihad-Aranyaka and another from Vallejo.
7. In the El lmaginero edition the first two lines are on a single page and there is an orthographic variation:
"v�::Rdad I DADver" (36); the last two lines formed part of another poem, whose first line read: "las palabras
se tienen unas a otras un amor" (75).
8. An example that H<mison gives is of the word supay, meaning "power that can be associated with good or
evil," and which was altered by the Spaniards to only mean "devil." Interestingly, a love song of the oral tradi­
tion of Andean women "recovers the traditional pre-Hispanic essence of this Quechua concept" (Harrison 22).

71
Pe1jormance at La Grande, Eastern Oregon State College, 1995. Photo: Mel Buffington.
SOUND WRITTEN AN D SOUND BREATHING :
VERSIONS OF PALPABLE POETICS

Kenneth Sherwood

The poem is not speech, nor in the earth, nor on paper, but in the crossing and union of the
three in the place that is not.
-Cecilia Vicuna

PRELUDE: TilE GE OGRAPHY OF WRITING

Who writes on who'

W riting begins as gestures upon the earth for Cecilia Vicuna's long poem,
"Purmamarca." The poem reciprocates this initial writing-"en Ia tierra un
rombo de tierra" (a rhombus of earth on the earth)-which begins on the thigh of
the earth, next appears as a "lunar romboidal" (geometric mole) on the poet's own
thigh, and only then is brought to the page and inscribed by the poet as a poem.
Similarly, in the practice of an Andean diviner, words are received from lines
traced in the dust; these nonalphabetic signs are first made and then their mean­
ings unraveled, like the poetic word that is "both a question and an answer" at
once.' So, a question like "Who writes on who?" leads to the many questions that
weave through Vicuna's poems: Where is the poem? Who writes the poem? What
is the relation between alphabetic and other writings, between speech and writ­
ing, between writing and reading, between reading aloud and performing, or
between myth and poetry? The poems make varying responses, sometimes pro­
visional or barely hinting.

73
K e n n e t h Sherwood

Vicuna writes that, as in divining, "to approach words from poetry is a form of
asking questions" (UW 34). Consistently, her poems reflect an intimate concern
with language, and a belief that, in poetry, words are not simply instruments
under the writer's or speaker's controL Where calendars and divining may be ori­
ented toward the past or future, "the word is the divination of what we are now
and why" (UW 34). I n this, her poetics resembles that of the Mazatec sh9man,
Marfa Sabina, whom Vicuna quotes-"Language falls, comes from above as little
luminous objects that fall from heaven, which I catch word after word with my
hands" (quoted in UW 52).

She on us or us in her?

I . "To SAY A COUPLE OF MYTHS THAT ARE PERTINENT":

MYTH, PoETRY, SPEECH, AND vVRITING

For the discourse of literary criticism, the spoken poem is conspicuous only in its
absence. The full measure of Cecilia Vicuna's poetry cannot be taken, however, if
it is considered in the conventional terms of written literature. As Eliot Weinberger
suggests in the introduction to Unravelling Words and the Weaving of Water, her
poems must be approached by "thinking first of their performance" (xi). The hybrid
of both the conventions of VVestern literature and an oral tradition, these are poems
of secondary orality (poetry that proceeds through writing to performance).
Literary approaches to the poem, even in the wake of Derridean textuality/
retain their immense holdings of circumscribed and carefully provenanced poet­
ic artifacts (now called texts) that are the payoff of lingering New Critical invest­
ments. Ambitious for a more rigorous, scientific criticism, New Criticism's imag­
ination of the poem "encouraged the illusion" that the work was autonomous and
could be "adequately studied or even understood in isolation" (Eagleton 44). Its
objective was "to divorce the poem from any context beyond itself and propose a
critical method sufficient to understanding its full value from a study of the
object" (Drucker 230). This particular method bounded the poem, created it as
an interiority, an enclosed system of meaning, while simultaneously excluding all
that was now exterior, including alternate versions of the text.
The New Critical conception depends upon a stable, authoritative text1 to
maintain the poem's autonomy, one to which the orally composed poem must
seem irreconcilable. In short, it is a poetics made to account only for the written
poem. Albert Lord, one of the earliest modern scholars of oral poetry after his
teacher, William Parry, seems to have subscribed to this dichotomization of oral­
ity and literacy, and to its implicitly hierarchic genealogy:
Once the oral technique is lost, it is never regained. The written technique, on the other
hand, is not compatible with the oral technique, and the two could not possibly combine, to

74
 Sound 'Written and Sound Breathing

form another, a third, a "transitional" technique. I t is conceivable that a man might be a n oral
poet in his younger years and a wriuen poet later in life, but it is not possible that he be both
an oral and a written poet at any given time in his career. The two by their very nature are
mutually exclusive. (Lord 129)

Informed by a Romantic sensibility, Lord describes an irrevers ible separation of

oral and written poetry, so that his "oral" is uncontaminated, preliterate. His the­
ory of oral formulae was partly designed to quantify the oral and written influ­
ences in a poem, so that, having mel a threshold, a poem could be aulhenticat­
ed as oral. This, and the ancillary burden of arguing for the Homeric epic a s the
product of a single, o rally composing bard, led him to the unfortunate conclu­
sion-one that Vicuna's work challenges-that oral and written poetry "by their
very nature are mutually exclusive."
Ruth Finnegan notes Lord's significant emphasis on the "lack of a fixed and
'correct' version of the text in oral literature," even while she questions his notion
that the formula is a necessary and defining condition of the oral poem (Finnegan
69). Lord's formulaic theory corrects the false ideas that oral poetry is equivalent
to rechation from memory, is necessarily communal, and is composed of static
forms fixed by tradition. While it is tempting to naturalize the written poem as a
model for poetry in general, Finnegan questions the applicability of the concep­
Lions of written literature to oral poetry: "The model of written literature with its
emphasis on the text, the original and correct version, has for long bedeviled study
of oral literature, and led researchers into unfruitful and misleading questions in
an attempt to impose a similar model on oral literature" (69). The "model of writ­
ten lilerature" entails the "work," a unified and bounded autho rity whose mean­
ing is stable across time and cu h ure. It is the proposition that "work" exists as a
singularity that allows critical editors to make decisions of recension (the priori­
tization of one among several variant readings) and emendaLion (the correction of
probable errors) in their pursuit of an authoritative text.
Unfortunately, anthropology too has imposed textual models upon the oral poem,
partly in order to bound it. Early ethnographers seem to have had few reservations
about adapting the models' emphasis "on the text" and "the original" to the study of
oral poetry. In a thoughtful narrative, Lord envisions the seemingly inevitable (and
suitably tragic) collision of orality and textuality in the scene of fieldwork:
The singer who dictated iL was its "author," and it reflected a single momen t in the tradit ion.
It was unique. Yet, unwittinglyperhaps, a fixed text was established. Proteus was pho­
Lographed, and no matter under what other forms he might appear in the future this would
,

become the shape that was changed; this would be the "original ." or course the singer was
not affected at all . . . The tradition went on. 1'\or was the audience affected. They thought
in his terms, in the terms of multiformity. But there was another world, of those who could
read and write, of those who came to think of the written text not as the recording of a
moment of the tradition but as the song. ( 124-25)

75
K e n n e t h S h e rwood

Here, the imagination of tradition is suspiciously pure, but the imposition of "original"
status on the oral transcription and its constitution of "the" poem seem worth consid­
ering. Is the fable of transformation before us an expulsion from the garden, or is it an
emergence from a shadovvy cave? Either version renders visible the parameters of the
"textual economy" within which discussion of oral poetry has been forced to operate.
While we have been discussing the powerful dichotomy of orality and li�eracy,
another drama has been taking shape unnoticed, the contest between poetry
and-what has too often been defined as its opposite-myth. Here we see New
Criticism's anthropological twin, Levi-Strauss's structuralism, dealing with the
nontextuality of oral poetry by calling it myth and then defining myth as a use of
language that is eminently translatable, where words themselves, the "style,"
"original music," and "syntax," can be dismissed in the face of "the story which it
tells." Such a conception has its practical advantages, as Levi-Strauss notes
(without acknowledging its presumptions about the subliterary status of the
object of study): "The mythical value of myth is preserved through the worst
translations. Whatever our ignorance o f the language and the culture of the peo­
ple where i t originated, a myth is still felt as a myth by any reader anywhere in
the world" (206). Even as it reduces "myth" to "mythical value," that which is left
once language i s stripped away, this doubly reductive notion of myth proposes
that a sufficient condition of myth is that it b e "felt as a myth." The circular logic
generalizes myth and reduces the burden on the mythographer.
For Levi-Strauss, the surplus of variants is so vexing that an erasure of the words
themselves must have seemed the only way to clean up the mess. "Myth is lan­
guage, functioning at an especially high level where meani.ng succeeds practically
at taking off from the linguistic ground on which it keeps rolling" (206). In this con­
ception, it is the linguistic particulars (e.g., syntax) that ground meaning, denying
it its proper due-flight away from language. Its transcendental epistemology sug­
gests that de-worded myth holds a privileged place to which the actual individual
tellings of a myth only uneasily aspire. Myths, after all, come to their collectors
wrapped in the nasty particularities of language. In Levi-Strauss's conception, a
deeper formal unit, the mytheme, structures this quasi-universal unconsciousness.
The mythographer then combs through the many "stories" collected, extracts these
mythemes, elides textual variants and reassembles the Myth, proper noun.
Since what gets collected in books (for readers to "fee l as myth") is most often
oral in origin, the process of textualization often includes the comparison of sever­
al tellings or versions of a myth. A distillation follows, in the course of which the
variances between the tellings, the exact phrases used, the very names of the
tellers, may be dropped off as a new, generalized, and condensed Myth is produced.
It is easy to see, in this parody of a mythography, how the specifics must seem
unimportant, since no detail can be invested with more significance than that of
the whimsical, perhaps even accidental variant of a single teller. The significant

76
 Sound Written and Sound Breathing

Purnw1narca,
North ofArgentina,
1987. Photo: Cesar
Patemosto.

role of oral transmiSSIOn (and perhaps bad transcription) in the writing up of

myths allows a textual scholar like Levi-Strauss to propose their translinguistic
quality, and almost necessitates the generation of the fictional "Myth" that is set
above and prior to its material, variant instances.
Clearly, a myth so constituted would stray far from poetry, stripped as it is of its
outer bark. The examples of particularizing transcriptions of oral poetry, which
demonstrate the signifying accomplished through the vocal dimension, should
have largely discredited such an antipoetic approach to myth. But i t is still com­
mon to find anthropologists in important journals calling up myths in their own
prosaically worded synopses, without any sense that this myth might better be
considered as an authored story or poem.
The advent of "total translation" within the context of the ethnopoetics move­
ment of the 1970s marked the first concerted attempt-the only significant
movement to date-to deal with the extraneous spoken dimensions of poetry
(Tedlock 1983; Rothenberg 1983).• Taking a cue from Charles Olson's "projec­
tive verse," total translations aimed to produce texts particular enough to be used
as scores for spoken performance. Suddenly, phrasing, intonation, and the deliv­
ery of the poem had significance (not to mention the rich parallelism, syntax, or
diction). The spoken could no longer be swept under the carpet when the artistry
that composed these poems was revealed. As these transcriptions moved toward
providing ever more sufficient accounts of "the performance," like Lord's fictive
folklorist, they posited their own "original."

77
Kenneth Sherwood

Even as it acknowledges aspects of the spoken poem that linguistics had disre·
garded in its concern for phonetics, total translation cannot accommodate the
span of the poems' potentially limitless telLings. Like Saussurean linguistics, it
needs to downplay the historical, the variant, and the potential for intervention
by individual speakers. Recall that for Saussure, "the sole object of study in lin­
guistics was the normal, regular existence of a language already establishe�" (72);
total translation takes the single witnessed instance of performance as the poem,
the transcription its sole object. While the neglect of the span of versions may
seem a minor point, it is the key to the rethinking of a spoken poetics as inter·
face or hybrid (and not a "transitional technique") between the oral and written.
We can say that the "spoken poem" (where nontextual variability and version·
ing are implicated in its very spokenness) is essentially absent from the critical
discourses that might address it. This absence can be seen as one dimension of
the more general repression-"dematerialization of the text" (Eagleton 49)-of
languages' materialities in these discourses. 'Writing about visual materiality and
the reading of marked typography, Johanna Drucker notes that "the surplus of
information provided by the expressive manifestation of the written form cannot
be fixed, as Saussure had wished to fix the values of linguistic terms, in a finite
order of a closed set of elements" (245). When the delivery of the poems
becomes an act of poesis rather than a mere recapitulation or recitation, it reveals
the expressive manifestation of sound, the materiality of the spoken; it allows the
audience to take the performance's variations as valuable, as enrichments of the
work, not deviations from it. General recognition of this would require literary
scholars, for example, to attend to poetry performance and account for the result,
an enormous and unstable field of variations springing from the text-versioning
poetry's method for exceeding the boundaries of closed signification.
Performed or "versioned" or sounded poetries like Cecilia Vicuna's cannot be ade­
quately accounted for by a criticism that approaches poetry as a text to be disman­
tled with the New Critical tools of explication and evaluation; introducing the mul­
tiple spoken versions of the poem only compounds the task of reading if reading itself
is conceived as the establishment of the poems' meanings, the rules by which they
mean, and finally their adjudication. Yet if the reader even briefly accedes to the poet­
ics proposed by the versioning poem (rather than discounting it as an excessive faith
in language), the "mythic" aspect of this poetic can be understood: taking a poem
seriously has to mean being ready to reconsider the world in its terms.

II. WRITTEN AND BREATHING: THE DOUBLE WORKING OF WORDS

The dewording of myth and the dichotomizations of myth and poetry, orality, and
literacy stand in contrast to Cecilia Vicuna's Andean-influenced poetics. Her

78
 Sound Wr it t e n and Sound Breathing

"Palabrarmas" poems move "to enter words in order to see."1 Vicuna explains
their origin as " a vision in which individual words opened to reveal their inner
associations . . . " ( 1 992:27) For Vicuna, moving toward the material ground of
words "is the point of word working: to work speech, to speak watching speech
work" (UW 30). Word worbng, of course, is a partial translation of Palabrarrnas,
·
a neologism made from the Spanish palabra (word), labrar (work), armas (arms),
and mas (more). The playfulness concentrated in this one word reflects the poet's
sense of the richness and particularity of language.
Here, a poet coming out of a (mythic) oral tradition insists that poetry can be
made from the unravelling of individual words-an entering into the language,
rather than a motion to get behind or above it. A single word can spin multiple vari­
ants through the careful application of ear and eye-a versioning at the level of
individual words as well as whole poems. Vicuna further extends the possible def­
initions of Palabrarmas: "A word that means: to work words as one works the land;
to think of what the work does is to arm yourself with the vision of words. And
more: words are weapons, perhaps the only acceptable weapons" (1992:27). This
multiplicitous sense of words is seen by Regina Harrison as being generally
emblematic of the Quechua language. As evidence, she quotes from the lengthy
definition of the Quechua word huaca given by Garcilaso de Ia Vega, the Inca­
chronicler of Andean-Spanish contact:
It means something sacred . . . Likewise they call a huaca all the things that they had offered
up to the Sun . . . Also they call any large or small temple a huaca . . . Also they give the same
name to all those things which in beauty o r excellence excel above all the others of their type
. . . On the other hand, they call huaca all the ugly and monstrous things . . . Thus also they
name anything which strays from its natural path a huaca . . . They call a huaca the large
mountain chain . . . They give the same name to the large hills that stand out from the other
hills . . . (Quoted and translated in Harrison 88-89)

In her small folio, PALABRARmas, Vicuna herself looks into the multiple meanings
of a Quechua word:

. the name Pachapacariq, morning star, means at

once: amanecer de Ia tierra, tiempo-estrella, de la manana,
dawn of the earth, time-star, morning star
a name that changes from
place to place.
(PIILABRAR'Jnas)

Throughout Vicuna's work and thinking, the etymology becomes the occasion for
poetry, crossing languages. Across time, it sometimes involves a remembering of
lost or destroyed meanings-to remember or reconstruct; it is also a kind of listen­
ing, for "words want to speak" and so "to listen to them is the first task" (UW 36).

79
Kenneth Sherwood

vVhat do we mean by huaca, or "poem"? For that matter, what do we hear in the
"text" or "spoken performance"? In Buffalo, New York, on March 10, 1994, Cecilia
Vicuna gave a performance that was at once ordinary speech, myth, and poetry,
which bridged the oral/literate dichotomy by mixing oral composition with a "con­
ventional" reading (secondary orality) from texts in a book. Her performance
seemed to insist that the spoken and written versions of the poem are inse1prable.
In the course of listening to the tape of a performance, transcribing it, and com­
paring it with the poems in Unravelling Words, the use of the text as a loose score
becomes apparent. Particularly in the oscillations between Spanish and English (the
junctures as moments of possibility), the poems are performed outward from the text
rather than being simply recitations of it. Vicuna's dramatic physical presence as a
speaker and the accompaniment of music and gesture make this a clear performance .

As a substitute for the audio recording, which itself substitutes for the perfor­
mance, we have the twice-removed transcript" (made by this listener with the
help of recollection and an audio recording of the performance) :
[singing fades in]
orig i nally I wa s very glad to be here
but now I'm very sad

The absent context, it should be immediately cleat� can only be gestured to in a tran­
scription. Vicuna's performance had be en preceded by that of Toi Derricote, who
read quite personal poems about the experience of racism, so this plausible reason
for the change in Vicuna's mood would have been clear to all in the audience.

wanted to sin g
first I
for the snow to go away

[singing]
vaya vaya vaya vayaaa . . .
aya vaya aya vaya aya vayaaa . . .

but then its not only for the snow to go away

its also for what you've been saying

and I also wanted to say that

its good to be in front of a pai nt i n g that's called an ode to joy
and yet is so dark
its all dark
terribly dark

As with the paradigmatic exterior frame of the oral poem, Vicuna begins by spa­
tially and temporally locating the poem. Singing "vaya vaya" (go away), she situ­
ates herself in relation to what the audience has been hearing, the conditions

80
 Sound Written and Sound Breathing

outside, even the decorations of the room. The performance is thus made con­
text-specific and the audience is implicated within it.

[Cecilia stops shaking a loop of shells and hangs it around the microphone]

when we were asked to come here and speak

lets say about myth
the first thing that comes to mind is that
of course

just the name myth

is a name
being seen or being said from the outside

and
if I wanted to say just one thing about it it's that
as I perceive it

perhaps
The myth for us
is language
just plain words a nd

and then words

as I perceive them
they are ti m e

simply
time

and sound

written
and sound

breath in g

By noting that "Myth" is a name given from the outside, Vicuna urges her listen­
ers to reconsider it now from their shared position, which she has just located,
and to consider it as language. Myth is language, she says, plain words, and these
involve time, are composed of sound-and sound itself takes a double form,
being both written and breathing. In less than fifteen seconds, Vicuna has moved
us from a generalization of myth to the particulars of the words the audience is
hearing spoken and read to it. Where Levi-Strauss maintains that "Whatever our
ignorance of the language and the culture of the people where it originated, a

81
Kenneth S h e rwood

myth is still felt as a myth," Vicuna seems to recall the audience, now us, to the
very complex composition of its language.

and there's an an cie nt tradition that says tha t

the voice is the bridge

that throug h the thread of voice

we cross dimensions

because the universe has been created by sound

this is a common idea in ancient india
and in the ancient andes

so we create
by sound

and the word that we use now

SOUND
sonido en espaiiol
origi na l ly

in this proto europea n la ngu age

-

which is the mother language which we speak in English

it was swen

and swen means chant

an incantation
so even in in do eu ropea n languages sound
-

was inca ntati on

Sketching a rough etymology of "sound," Vicuna relates the term to the creation
of the material world. What might seem to be fluidly immaterial-vocal sound­
is described with a physical metaphor, "the thread of the voice." The conven­
tional dichotomization of language into oral and written is here refigu red, unified
by sound, as "sound breathing" and "sound written."
Th is i niti ally strange metaphor-voice as thread-is deeply implicated in
Andean culture. In a conc rete poem, Vicuna writes "la realidad es una linea."
The poem con si sts of this one line of poetr y written, seemingly vvith a single
stroke, on both sides of a card that is folded and bound with black thread. The
iconic ity of the s i gnifyi ng thread itself recalls the Quechua language, which ,

while it gained an alphabet from the Spanish, had its own system of writing prior
to the conque st Putting the thread and threadlike writing of her thin black script
.

together as one poem, Vicuna reminds us that letters are as physical as string. I t
i s an ena c tment of the line she has just improvised above-suggesting the mate-

82
 Sound Written and Sound Breathing

rial commonality of writing and voice; as she writes elsewhere: "The word is artic­
ulated silence and sound, organized light and shadow" (UW 40).
The reality of the line is also important in reference to the ceq'e, "a sight-line for
observing astronomical events in relation to the horizon in the ancient Andean city
of Cusco." The ceq'e system consisted of 328 l'!Uacas, one for each day of the year
and grouped into 4 1 spokes of 8 huacas each. The complicated mathematics of
this sight-line calendar system had multiple uses and levels of meaning, and has
been compared to the quipu (knot in Quechua), a group of multicolored threads
intricately knotted together. ln the notes to an art exhibition called " Fragments of
a Ceq'e," Vicu na discusses the ceq'e in relation to poetry and the voice:

Un sistema que coherfa para ellos

y que hoy
es un gesto 'sin sentido'.
El hilo pobre, incoherente , perdido, flota en el vacfo.
[. . . . ]
El ceq'e es una lfnea
o una forma de relaci6n?
Los mensajes circulan por el hilo
como e l agua en e l canal.

<_Has visto como viaja el agua

por un hilo de lana?
Pura hilaci6n
Pura circulaci6n.

A system that had coherence for them

and that today
is a gesture "without meaning."
The poor, incoherent, lost
thread floats in the void.
[ . . . .]

The ceq'e is a line

or a form of relation?
Messages circulate along the thread
like the water in the channel.
Have you seen how water travels
along a thread of wool?
Pure threadness
Pure circulation.

83
Kenneth Sherwood

Vicuna describes one of her own poems as "'the quipu that remembers noth­
ing,' an empty string, my first precarious work" (UW 5). I n trying to remember
(recordar) how the quipu is written, she notes the correspondence between recor­
dar and cuerdas, the strings of memory. Memory and language exist in relation to
the activity and materials of weaving, its hilaci6n and circulaci6n composing the
very architecture of a city. Vicuna evokes memory and writing in the Buffa.lo per­
formance, speaking a myth that seems to be a joking Andean version of Socrates'
complaint that alphabetic writing would diminish the memory:

now

because of this
al most funny request to speak of myth
I would just like to say
a couple of myths
that are pertinent I think to this moment

both from south america

one of them
is a contemporary myth
one that accounts for the origin of
people
who write
and people
who sing

and in this myth

the gods have created
the indigenous people of south america and
they have created them with great memory so
only through song
they can remember the history
of the whole
people

so
instead
the gods created some people
who have no memory so because they have not
this gift of memory

they were created with a little notebook in their hands

and these people are the europeans [laughing]

84
 Sound Written and Sound Breathing

Dividing the world into those who write with notebooks (European alphabetic
technology) and those who write with sound/strings (Andean quipu) certainly
illustrates, as it undercuts, the conventional dichotomy between orality and liter­
acy. This creation story suggests not that one flowed from the other, but the inde­
pendence of each system. Thus it is not a recapitulation of Socrates' prejudice
but a revisioning, one that recalls Deleuze and Guattari, who argue that
primitive societies are oral not because they lack a graphic system but because, on the con­
trary, the graphic system in these societies is independen t of the voice; it marks signs on the
body that respond to the voice, react to the voice, but that are autonomous and do not al ign
themselves on it. In return, barb arian civilizations are written, not because the voice has been
lost, but because the graphic system has lost its independence and its particular dimensions,
has aligned itself on the voice and has become subordinated to the voice. (202-203)

Posed against Lord's example of the irreversible entry into li teracy, Vicuna's poet­
ry seems to coincide with the notion that orality is not a lack of writing. Rather
tban subordinating writing or voice, her poetry puts them into play with each
other. It is perhaps the seeming necessity of the subordination that has preclud­
ed considerations of postliterate spoken poetry.
Vicuna locates her poetry at the interstices of myth and language, of voice and
writing-"sound breathing and sound written n This position allows her to turn
what has seemed the most written of all systems, Mayan hieroglyphs, into a form
of speaking: "In the M ayan letters Olson speaks of 'their leavings,' (what the
Maya left), but in Spanish 'sus dejos' would be 'their way of speaking' . . . And it
is the double aspect of this leaving that interests me . . . " ( 1 994). Playing between
these terms-writing that is left, permanently, and speaking that leaves, flees­
Vicuna's poetry is secondarily oraL It is composed in writing but influenced by
oral forms and then re-oralized in performance.
50

that is one myth I wanted to recall for you

and then there is another one
th at
I particularly love
this is a myth
of
ahh
a creature
also contemporary myth
and this creature lives in the outskirts of lima
I don't know if you know about lima lim a
is l ik e the quintessential mestizo city
a city created by the whites that

85
K e n n e t h Sherwood

cannot admit
even to this moment of being
quite in peru
that is to say
quite in the andes
this could be said of santiago
the city where I come from <louder>
can [louder)
you're not hearing me? <no, . . . can't hear you at all>
not at all?
<no . . . nah.>
[laughs)
you see
talking about sound
I am sick
that is the problem
I have a sore throat u rn
what do I do

<you can't turn that up? can you turn the mike up?>

if I try to speak louder

it will only

<lets take a three minute pause, to set the PA up>

Here the performance is interrupted because of sou nd 's failure to "bridge," as

Vicuna earlier put i t ( o r is it the audience's failure to hear?). "Sound breathing"
seems to face some of the same problems of illegibility that a written text might,
with the occasional advantage that it is easier to forget, to dismember and re­
member an unpleasant story. The writing of the transcript refuses to forget, mark­
ing what arguably might better be forgotten. The irony of the insistence that the
poet use an amplification system will become apparent.

so ahhh
I will not repeat the kinds of things
that I was saying
because they are better
lost

[laughs)

but I will pick up with the pistash o

86
 Sound Written and Sound Breathing

pistacho? no'
pi
BPIII'schtaKo
the BPII 'schtaKo myth
because I don't think you want to miss that one
and so
I was saying that this is a contemporary myth
about sound and
in the outskirts of lima
this creature called the BPI'staKo lives
and this creature has been ahh
placed there by the europeans
and his purpose is to eat up all the indians
that come down the city
to find jobs
so when you come into the city
you hear this hummmmmmmmmmmmmmmm

like you're hearing right now

and the hummmmm of all machines
of airplanes of cars and so forth
is the sound of this BPIII'schtaKo
that has eaten up
and is continuing to eat all the indians
so industrial noisze ISz the lament
of the indians that have been eaten up
so
hhuuuuuuuuuuuuu

thats it

we really like lament

lament is what makes us
the weeping and the crying
so Jose Leza ma Lima says
Light is the first visible animal of the invisible

[6 min utes real time; Vicuna begins reading from Unravelling Words and the Weaving
of Water.]
lAdooo6nde vaaaan los suuuuaves inuuuumeros . . .

As would many oral poets, Vicuna incorporates the accident (a mplifier hum in
this case) into the telling, a gesture that makes the work specific to a place and

87
K e n n e t h Sherwood

moment and "the linguistic ground on which it keeps rolling." The noise that
threatens to devour the Indians coming into Lima was placed there by
Europeans, strangers from the culture that devalues sound.7 The question
remains as to whether the people of the notebook can learn to hear the sound
before them, for example, at a poetry reading, or whether they will imagine the
notes they take away from the event to be sufficient for remembering it. 1

I I I . "VoicE IS THE BRIDGE": THE PoEM AND ITs SPOKEN DouBLE

Was that a real poem or did you just make it up yourself?

-q>�estion from the a·u.dience, quoted by RobeJi Greeley

While Vicuna's performance provides a dramatic example of the meaning and

richness contained in the "commentary" to a poetry reading, it will hardly be
received as an argument for the ethnography of the poetry reading as a whole.
The exceptional commentary may add some information, but, beyond that, of
what concern is the spoken poem to the reader? After all, he or she can normal­
ly buy a copy of the poet's book and peruse it at wilL
What if the poetry reading, aside from the commentary, contributes to the
meaning of the poem and, indeed, constitutes something like a "revised edition"?
While a poet reading from a book hardly compares to the primary orality of a poet
composing orally, the secondary orality produces a site of recomposition, intro­
duces a relation to a specific audience into the poems (deixis), and may reinflect
the written poem with many of the characteristics typical of primary oral poetry.
How different is it for an oral poet to call up a poem from memory than for a sec­
ondarily oral poet to perform it from a book?
In Vicuna's case, the end of the introductory commentary is acknowledged with
"thats it," but the reading of written poems begins without hesitation, suggesting
that the commentary and poems are interrelated forms. We have been paying
attention to the performance thus far, because it has been an improvised compo­
sition of new material; but perhaps we also need to attend to the performances
of previously written poems, understanding their spoken versions as alternate
forms of publication (as verbal changes from the text are introduced and as the
intonation, pacing, and articulation of the spoken version become part of the new
poem). The need is more clear in Vicuna's case than with many poetry readings.
She does not simply "read" poems from a written text, she weaves variations.
Beginning "(Ad6nde van/los suaves innumeros" in the book version, "Iridesce"
(UW 68) is read first in Spanish, then, more slowly and with more distinct paus­
es at the stanza breaks, in English. In Spanish, the vowels are stretched beyond
their "ordinary" duration. At what point would one say that the poem was read
"as is" rather than performed or orally versioned, when a careful transcript from
tape matches the printed poem? The poem does not follow directly from the

88
 Sound Written and Sound Breathing

concern with "noise" of the preceding "commentary," but Vicuna continues with
a flow that barely admits the interruption of the poem. Does she mean for us to
consider it in relation to her "commentary"? It seems to be linking back to the
first myth she offered, before the sound system interrupted.

now there has been a lot of debate

as to how come that
these cultures who well supposedly didnt have any
form of writing
well that also can be debated
because they had SOFT forms of writing
like writing with knots
writing with signs
just
on the soil itself
writi ng with knots and so forth
but the main thing
as I see it
is that for these people
the andean people
everything is language
as I was just saying
the humm in this room
is also language

hmmm

and so is light entering the pores

Only with this last line has the industrial noise of the commentary been eased
into relation with the lost light rays that begin the poem. Indians entering the
city, or light entering the pores, is language and has been lost. The first lines of
"Iridesce," where light is knotted like writing, recall that how to read the strings
of the qu·ipu is no longer remembered, has also been swa.llowed:

Ad6nde van Where do they go

los suaves innumeros all those soft rays

Apinandose en haz? gathering in a /�not?

We are given the epigraph from Jose Lezama Lima: "Prayers are threads I and
weaving is the birth of lighL" Then the next poem begins in Spanish, but in this

89
K e n n e t h Sherwood

case a new version is made. Is this what "soft writing" allows? Vicuna begins by
reading only the first page of "Oro es tu hilar" (UW 96-10 I ) in Spanish, drop­
ping out four lines, and concluding with "Marcas senales II Palla y paca." She fol­
lows this with nearly the full three pages of the English version, including the
lines dropped from the first page of the Spanish and then abruptly stopping five
lines short of the end of the poem with the line "woven into one." 1

Have these "readings" of the poem existed before? How should they be con­
sidered in relation to the print-published versions, as interpretations, accidents?
Why has Vicuna so versioned the poem in reading it? Before we can answer these
questions for ourselves-questions that might only occur to someone following
along with the recording of this reading in a book-Vicuna begins explaining:

now this whole poem has been constructed with like

so many puns
word plays in Spanish i n relation to Quechua

like for example if you say in Spanish estelar

it means starry but it a lso means "it is a loom"
hmm
and of cou rse the idea of constellations
being woven with words is an ancient idea
and when you say oro i n Spanish
you're sayi ng gold but you re also saying I pray
'

and the real gold in ancient times was the process itself
the art of wea vi ng and so weaving was conceived
as a prayer
and the most precious weavings were burned
so that they co uld fly
up
in terms of the signs
that the smoke make

hmm

and so

Una es el agua
y su misma sed

water
and its thirst
are one (UW 103)

90
 Sound Written and Sound Breathing

The segue into the poem ("and so") suggests that, for Vicuna, the poems have a
direct, almost grammatical relationship to the commentaries that surround lhem.
Perhaps we cannot even talk about the commentaries and poems as though lhey
were separable, since in the transcript they blend. The next poem "Unuy Quita"
is read first in Spanish, then in English ( UW l 06). Phrases like "Fertile valley"
and "Cup I in the mist" &om this poem echo with the fragment that follows.

Mist is the semen of the mountains

where the streams are born
Mist is the semen of the forest
where coolness is born (part of UW 1 1 4 in English)

Without an audible page-turn or pause, Vicuna continues, reading "iNeblinilla

fibrosa!" in Spanish ( UW l l 0), and then proceeds straight to the English on the
facing page, withOLit pause. At lines 8-9, she changes "How beautiful? I How boun­
tiful?" to "How beautiful I How beauliful," matching the Spanish "jQue hermosa I
que hermosa!"

and so
this will be the last poem because
we have one more singer
coming u p

Se acabara
Ia fuente
Ia propia silencia
Ia silbida clave

iSe acabara!

,!Donde se ira Ia neblina?

,!La bruma vivificante?
,!D6nde se ira?

Fresco, Fresco
i El sosten de Ia tierra!
ilos raci mos de llanto!

i Los corazones apagados

sin neblinar!

"Se acabara" is read as printed in Spanish, followed by an improvised coda. The

English version does not have the coda i n translation, but is altered i n other ways.

seeee va

91
Kenneth Sherwood

se va se va se va

The round spring

its own silence

Where did
the fog go [these two lines added as if accidentally]

Where will the fog go?

The life giving mist?
Where will it go?

Our hearts extinguished

the fog is g o ne ! gracias [text has "when the fog is gone"]
[clapping]

Dealing with the spoken instances of poetry allows for a rethinking of poetry
and its relation to the voice and writing. Numerous threads have been left unex­
plored. How the intonation of the texts comments on their meaning or the audi­
ence's relation to them has not been addressed. The sequencing and re-version­
ing have not been thoroughly compared to the versions of these poems in print,
or in the author's own text. Because this reading was part of a four-person tour
sponsored by the Poetry Society of America, the dynamics of its context, perhaps
alluded to by Vicuna's initial "because of this almost funny request to speak of
myth," might also have been explored fruitfully. Even so, the difficulty of re­
membering these spoken poems reveals how strongly indebted our notions of
poetry are to a textual, artifactual economy. The closure of such a system is
inconceivable &om an oral point of hearing. What could be the purpose of devel­
oping this dispersed notion of poem = multiple versions? If language, and
through it poetry, is a form of relation, unas lineas that transect Cuzco and every
other city to which we bring it, then the difficult navigation across the versions'
spans is the only site the poem can have. Or, in the epigraph that began this
essay, Vicuna's words: "The poem is not speech, nor in the earth, nor on paper,
but in the crossing and union of the three in the place that is not"
("Purmamarca").

92
 Sound Written a n d Sound Breathing

BIBLIOGRAPBY:

DELEUZE, Gilles . and GuA'rfARI, Felix . Anti-Oedipus: C"pit."lism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press. 1983.
DnucKER, Johanna. The Visible Word: Experimental Typograplty and Modern Art, 1909-1923. Chicago:
U niversity of Chicago Press, 1995.
EAGLETON, ·rerry. Literal)' Theory. l'vlinneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983.
FINNEGAN, Ruth. Oral Poet1y Its Nature, Significance and Soci.al Context. Bloomington: Indiana Universit)'
Press, 1992.
HARRISON, REGINA. Signs, Songs, and 1\1/ern.ory in tlte Andes: Transl11tiJ<g Queclwa Language arzd Cu.ltme.
Aust in: University of Texas Press, 1989.
LEVI-STRAUSS, Claude. Stmctural Anthropology. Carden City: Anchor Books, 1967.
Lono, t\lbert B. The Singer of Tales. Cambridge : Harvard University Press, 1960.
RoTHENBERG, Jerome . "Total Translation: An Experiment in the Presentation of American Indian Poetry."
Symposium of the Whole: A Range of Discourse Toward an Ethnopoetics. Ed. Jerome Roth enberg and Diane
Rothenberg. Berkeley: University of Cal ifornia Press, 1983: 381-93.
SAUSSURE. Ferdinand de. Course in Ceneml LiYiguistics. Trans. Roy Hards. La Salle, Ill.: Open Court, 1983.
TEDLOCK, Dennis. The Spoken Word and the Work ofInterpretation. Philadel phia: University of Pennsylvania
Press, 1983.
VICUJ\!A, Cecila . Ceq'e Fmgments/Fragmentos de "" Ceq'e: Tl1e Centerfor CO'IItemporary Arts Presents Cecilia
Vicuiia: Mixed Media lnstallat.ion, ]1111.e 24-}uly 29, 1994. Exhibition pam phlet, 1994.
- PALABRARmas. A Morning Star Folio 5.2 (April 1994).
- "Purmamarca," in Chain (Spting 1995): 231-35.
- "Thread of the Voice: !vlyth for Us Is Language . " Rif/t 4.1 ( 1995) Talk transcribed by Kenneth Sherwood.
- Unravelli.ng Words and the Weaving of Water. Trans. Eliot Weinberger and Suzanne Jill Levine. Ed. and
inti'O Eliot Weinberger. Saint Paul, Minn: Graywolf, 1992.

NOTES:

I. Unravelling Words and the Weaving of Wate1; 34, subsequently UW. See Bibliography at end of chapter.
2. Deconstruc tion demonstrates the active flow of signifiers within the text, but such analysis presumes the
stable status of the work itself (as physical, historical object) in order to activate its internal system. A clas­
sic examp le, Roland B arthes's S/Z: An Essay destabilizes the text by showing its inconsistencies. a remark­
able p rocess only against the expectation of the text's stability; the entertainment of multiple versions of the
text would equally achieve such a destabilization.
3. This loose use of "textuality" would be objected to by textual critics like Jerome McCann, whose post­
structuralist inflected usage of the same term· is intended to oppose the contained "work. "
4. While Tedlock disclaims the application of Rothenberg's "total translation" for his work, the term serves
here as useful shorthand in distinguishing translation projects, however varied in themselves (and including
subsequent variations), that emphasize the rendering of performance dimensions and poetic devices of a
particular "telling" of an oral poem from those that minimize them .
5. See both the section of Unra11elling Words and the Weaving of Water entitled "PalabrJtmas" and the 1994
Morning Star Folio with the same title .
6. Se.e Vicuna, "Thread of the Voice."
7. Despite Derrida's proper contention that "voice" has been accorded metaphysical privilege as a sign o f
presence, the actual voices of those who did not themselves write (the indigenous peoples living in the
Americas at the time of the conquest, the voices of women denied a pen of their own) have been subordi­
nated or, more often, erased from the written record. It might be possible to say that writing has subordi­
nated itself to the image of the voice, but it has seldom listened carefully to the voices themselves.

93
 W H O S E -WEAVI N G - M E LT E D
ow<ine pemustaylto tiltpuyewtislto

Even when the coldest day that winter

waited for her toes and face
she carried two quill needles
outside
and tried to weave a blanket
out of snow. She tried it that way.

But when she pulled that blanket home

on her sled and brought it inside
to sleep under, it MELTED
and ended up in soup broth.

Still she did not want to use

the same things everyone else used
for weaving.

So, later, she gathered some

of her family and friends outside
and tried to weave together
the cold breath steam
you could SEE
coming out of their noses and mouths
into the air!
She went quickly from one person to the other,
QUICKLY trying to weave together

the breaths you could see. It was taking

a long time and no one could tell
,

how it was goi ng! Each piece of weaving-breath

melted too, into the air, and stopped
coming out altogether
once everyone took their noses and mouths
inside.

Personal-Name-Origin-Stories
told by Samuel Makidemewabe
translated by Howard Norman
Talki11g Leaves Issue, Panjandrum TV, edited by Da,�d Cuss, San Francisco. 1975.

95
Biographical Notes on Cecilia Vicuna

Born in Sanliago de Chile, 1948

Studied al the National School of Fine Arts, Uni,·ersity of Chile, Sanriago.
MFA 1971 Post Graduate Studies al 1he Slade School of Fine Arts,
University Coll ege, London, 1972-73. Lived in Bogota, from 1975 10 1980,
Lnwelling extensively through lhe Amaw n basin, Colombia and Venezuela.
Has lived in New York since 1980, and continues to work for long periods
in South America.

AWARDS AND HONORS

1995-96: 1l1c Fund for Poetry Award, New York.

Lee Krasner·Jackson Pollock Award, New York.
I 992: Arts InternationalAward, Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Fund.
1988: Invited to the Art Olympiud, Seoul by the Guggenmhcim rvlu>eum of
New York, declined.
1985: Human Rights Exile Award. Fund for Free Expression, New York.
1983: LINE II Award for PrecarioiPrecarious. New York.
1972: British Council Scholarship in the Unire<l Kingdom.
 PUBLICATIONS Magda Bogin, translated by Magda Bogin, 1988.
ii
-A P/i;mfor Esmpe, by Adolfo Bioy Casares, translated by SuzanneJill Levine, 1988.
Poetry Books
- Altnzor, by Vicente Huidobro, translated by Eliot Weinberger, 1988.
- Word & Thread, translated by Rosa Alcala, Morning Star Publications,
Edinburgh, Scotland , 1996.
Poetry in Anthologies:
-La realidad es tma lfnea. Kanaal Art Foundation, Konrijk. Belgium, 1994.
- PALABRARmasl WURWAPPINschmv, translated by Edwin Morgan, - Poemsfor the Mill1mi1trn. Vol I I . edited by jerome Rothenber·g and Pierre
Morning Star Puhlications, Folio 5/2, Edinburgh, Scotland, 1994. )oris, The University of California Press, Fall 1997.
- Unravelling Words & t!te Weaving of \�iltet; edited by Eliot Weinberger. - \leintici1-wo A1'los de_Poesfa Cltilenn, sel.ecci6n de Teres
a Ca lderon, Lila
translated by Eliot Weinberger and Suzanne jill Levine, Graywolf Press, 1992. Calderon y Thomns Harris, Fondo de Cultura Econ6mica, Santiago, Chile 1996.
-La Wik'wia, Francisco Zegers Editor. Santiago de Chile, 1990. - Voicing Today's Visiorrs, edited by 1\'lara R. Witzling. Universe Publishing.
- Samara, Ediciones Ernbalaje, Museo Rayo, Colombia, 1986. New York, 1994.
- PALABRARmns, Ediciones El lmaginero, Buenos Aires, 1984. -These are Not Sweet Gi rls, Poetry by Latin American Women, edited by
- Luxumei o e/ 11·aspie de Ia Doctrina , Editorial Oasis. Mexico, 1983. Ma1jorie Agosin, White Pine Press. 1994.
- Precario!Precarious, translated by Anne Twitty, Tanam Press. New York, - El Pincer de Ia Palalmt , selecci6n de /vlargarite Ferntft1dez-Oimos )' Liznbetlt
1983 .ni, editorial Planeta, Mexico, 1991.
Paravisi
- Siete Poeuws. Ediciones Centro Colombo Americano, Bogota 1979. - Being America, edited by Rachel Weiss, White Pine Press, New York, 199 I .
- Srlboramf, translated by Felipe Ehrenberg with the author, Beau Ceste - Cartas a!Azar, Unn Muestra de Poesfa Chilerw, selecci6r1 de Marfa Teresa
Press, England, 1973. Adriasoln )' \kr611ica Zondeh, Ediciones Ergo Sum. Santiago 1989.
- l'Ou Can't. Drown the Fire, u>tin American \>10me•·• Writ.ing ir1 Exile. edited by
Alicia Partnoy, Cleis Press, 1988.
Boohs Edited
-Blasted Allegories, edited by Brian Wall is, The New Museum and M.I.T.
- Ol, Four Maptrche Poets, a bilingual an thology edited by Cecilia Vicuna, Press, 1 98 7.
translated by john Bierhorst, Americas Society, New York, Fall 1997. - Fire Over �\vter, edited by Reese Wiliams, Tanarn Press. New York, 1986.
- Word-Soul, an anthology of the oral poetry of the Mbya-Cuarani, edited by - 71te Re newal of the Vision, edited by l'vlmjorie Agosin :md Cola Franzen.
Cecilia Vicuna "�th Ruben Bareiro Saguier. translated by W.S. IV!envin (in Espectacular Disease, london 1986.
progress). -'f1-le Deficmt Mttse, Hisptmic Feminist Poems, edited by Angel and Kate
-The Palabra S11r series of Latin American Literature in translation, published Flores, The Feminist Press, New York, 1986.
by Graywolf Press . - Piesn.e Pre Chile, Sloven.sky Spisomtel '(Antologie de lrl Poesie Chilienne), Praga ,
- 'D.e Cardboard House, by Martin Adan, tran slated by Katherine Silver, 1984.
1990. - La Not,fsima Poesfa Latinoamericana, selecci6rr. de jorge Boccane ra, editores
- The Selected Poems of Rosario Castellanos, edited by Cecilia Vicuna an d Mexicanos Unidos, Mexico 1978.
iii - Giomni Poeti Sudamericani, A cum di Hugo Garcia Robles e Umberto Selected Essays
Bonelli, Giulio Einaudi Editore, Torino, ltalia, 1972.
- T11e Third Stone, The Guardian. London. Nov 26, 1996.
- Sillltictica Euhebra, una lectura de Gnbrieltt Misrml, in 50 miO< de Gubriela
Selected Poetry Publications in Magazines i\listral, Ediciones del .\linisterio de Educaci6n, Chile, 1996.

- Re1>iew: Latin American Literature and Arts, II 54, Spring 1997, 'ie�> Yorl... f\'otesfrom ajonmey, in Sulfur II?A, Spring 1994,Ypsilami. Eastern ,\lichig;tn
Uni1-ersit)(
- Revista Unil'ersitaria, # 51 , Sant iago de Ch1le, 1996.
- The lm>elllion of Pm>ert}'. in America. Bride oftl1e Sun. 500 ll.>arl Latin
- Chain /2, Spring 1995, Buffalo, New York.
America and the Low Countries. Royal i\luseum oF Fin<'Arts, Antwerp.
- Tile American Poetry Re��ew, ,\la)'-june 1995.
Belgium, 1992.
- RIFff, A11 Electronic Spacefor New fbetry, Buffalo, New )ork. 1994.
- Andinn Gabriela, in Una Palabra C6mplice. E11cne111ro COli GniJriela Mist mi.
- Sl1ambala Sun, Boulder, Colorado, July 1994.
Revs
i ta /sis, Vol A1l, Die !989, Santiago. Chile
Rolling Stock, H 1 7- 18, 1990, University of Colorado. Boulder.
- Metafrsica del Textil, in Tmmemos, Ai\o 11, #31, Nov 1989, Bue nosAires
- Hora de Poesra, II 65-66, 1989, Barcelona.
- Quntro Dmme in Latinoalllericn. Anno V, # 13, Roma, ltalia, 1984
- I-/eresies, /1 24, 1989, New York.
- Das Exil, zmd U/Jer Das Exil in Clzilellas, DriiiiJell 1111d Drauf.<ell, Kunstamt,
- Quimera. II 94, 1989, Barcelona.
Krcu1berg, Berlin, 1983
- Kritca
i . H 2R, 1988, Santiago de Chile .
- Death mzd Defense Guatemalan 1Nomcr�, a COrJI'CJ'Satiou wit/1 ls{Jbc/ Fmirc,
- El Esj>iritu del \4-Jl/e, H 2, Santiago de Chile, 1987.
in Heresies, 1115. New York, 1 982
- Americart Poetry Revie111, March-April, 1987.
- Chr"'sir�g tlw Feather, in Heresies, II 15, N�w York, 1982
- The Raddle NlooJ1, II 4, British Columb ia , Canada, 1986.
- Pam Contrihuir a ICJ tuemoda , in Ltl Bicicleta, #24, Santl.1go de Chile.
- Review: Latin American Literature and A11s. II 34, 1985, New York.
1982
- LAH. 1 984. Madrid.
- Tire Coup came to ltillrl'hat l lol'ed, in Spare Rib. II 28. London 19i4
-Hom de Poesr
a, II 3 1 . 1984, Barcelona.
- Palin1psesto, II I, 1982, Rome.
- CuClder11os Hispmzoamericanos, II 382. 1982, Madrid.
Selected Papers and Lectures
- Heresies. # 13. 19R I , New York
- Eco, H 21 9, 1980. Bogota. - -n,e Melodic Matrix, at the Tenth International Conference on

-Acuarimtmlima, # 18, 1978, i\ledeUin. Translation, Cen tering ,\larginality, Barnard College, Columbiu University.
- El Nnciona/, 11 389, 1976, Ciudad de Mc.\ico. Nov 16, 1996.
- E..,trnmuros. 1972, Caracas. -Acces,s at the Poetry Conference The Politics of ac�c�ibilit)·. S.n \ l,ul.s Poet!)
- Mwulo Nue�'O, 1968, Paris. Project, NewYork, 1995
- EL Como Emplmnado, II 25, 1968, Ciuclacl de ,\texico. - Writitzg ou Air, at Cornell Uni\·ersity. 1995.
EL Como Emplumtrdo, 1122, 1967. Ciuclad de ,\lexica. - Fertile Scriptures, at the Ethnopoetics Week Summer program. llu· Naropa
iv Institute, Boulder, Colorado. -Cecilia Vlcuiia talks about lrer art, at the Archer i\'1. l lunl ington Art Gallet').
- lvlallarmc see11 from Amazot�ia, at the Poetic s Program Seminar, SUNY, University ofTexas, at Austin 1987.
Buff;do, New York. 1993. - Listclling, at the Fourth lnternatior1ul Translation Conference at Barnard
- Rosnrio Castellmws, 71w Word s
i a Hard Look. at Poet's House, New York, 1993. College, new York, 1986.
-An Au10&iograplty in.J\ri, at the University of Oregon. Eugene, Oregon 1993. - Eros del Sud, A vision of ancient and new eroticism, at Franklin Fumacc,
- Oral Mem01y, at the Cul tural Transmission Conference, Bard College, New York, 1984.
New York, 1992. - U�O\ de la lmaginaci6n, at AIGLE Associntion. Buenos Aires, 1984.
- El A11de Futuro, at the Gund Theater, Ur11versuy art Museum, Berkeley, - Four C11ilean Women Poets at tf1e Modem Language Association, Ne"
Ca lifornia, 1992. York. 1983.
-Oir}' ornr, at the Tercer Congreso de Culturas l lis p;lnicas, Facultad e
Fi losofla y Letras, Universidad de Chil e, Santiago 1992.
Selected Poetry Workshops and Seminars Conducted
- t\rte Prect�tio, at the School of Architecurre, Uni,ersity of Pucno Rico, San
Juan, 1991. - Poetry Workshop for the Jack Kcrou,1c School of Drsembodied Poetics,
- 1\ilestiz.o Poeti cs, at the Next Soci ety Simposium, at St I\lark's Poetry Naropa Institute. Boulder, Colorado, 1994.
Project , New York. 1990. - Advanced Poetry course for the Writing Prognrrn at SUNY. Purchase, Ne"
- F!itrwl Tyiug. at the University of Connecticut, Storrs, Connecticut, 1990 York, 1994.
- FivePrecarious Works at the School of Visu;d arts, New York, 1990. - In the Presence of Language . a workshop in colloboration with RichHrd
- The No. at the Latinoamerica Despicrta Conference , Massach usetts Lewis and Julie Patton, at Poet's House. New York. 1994.
College of Art, Boston, 1989. - B i li ngual Poctty workshop at St l\1nrk's Poetry Project, New York, 1990.
- Ftrmca.<, a Pre-Columbian Ta'tile, at the Paro;ons School of Design, New)ark, 1989. - Bilingual Poetry Workshop at CUNY. New )ork, 1988.
- Tire LAtin American Oiaspora, at the Boston University Art Gallery, 1988 - Poetry Workshops for the New )ork Public Schools. Poets in Public
- Identity and Exile, at the Women Caucus on the Arts, Boston Public Service, New York, 1985.
Library, 1987, -Course on LatinAmerican Poeny at thc UnrversiOOd ubre.ARKE, Begot<!, 19i9.

SOLO ExrrtBITIONS 1994

y
-Ceq 'e l"mgmcuts, a site speci nc installation at the Center for Contemporar
1996 Arts, Sunttl Fe. New Mexico.
-Precmio, u site specific installation, at lrwcrleith I louse, the Royal Botanic - 1-/ilurubres Allqa, an anthological exhibition at the Kanaal /\rt FoundHtion .
Gardens. Edinburgh, Sco tland. Kortrijk, Belgium.
v 1992 de Zegherand Paul \kndenbroeck Royal Museum of Fine Arts.Antwerp, Bcl!(ium.
- £1 Arule Futuro, a site specific inst3113tion at the University Art Museum,
1991
Berkeley, California.
- Efecto de Viaje, Trece ArtiSiliS Clrile11os Rcsidc11tcs eu Nuem lbrk, curarcd b)
1990 juMo Pastor i\lellado, i\luseo Nacional de Bellas Artes, S<lntiago. Chile.
-Precarious, a sire specific installation at the E.xit Art Cdllcry. New York. 1990
1977 T11e Decade Show, The \lew Museum, New York.
- 1-lornerrajc a Vietnam, Fundaci6n CilbcriO Alzdle Avendano, Bogorj. 1988
1974 - Tiw Debt, E.Or An Callei)\ New York.
-A jounwl of Objects, 400 precarious objects, Ans i\leering Pla ce, London 1987
1973 - Latin Americtm Ar1isrs i11 New Yorh since 1970, A1chcr i\1. llu ntinglcln Callery,
- Pain Tirings & fupla11aticns, Institute or Contemporary Ans, London. Uni,•ersity of Texas at Austin.

1986
1971 - Segu11da Bierwl de fa Habana. Cuba.
- Pin turns PoeJnas )' B.'Plicaciones, Musco Nacional de Bellas Aries
Sant iago, Chile 1984
- Otor
lo, Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Santiago Chile. - Latin Anw1·ican Visual 'lhitthing. l\rt Awareness Callc1y. Lcxi11jl.lOn. New York.

/983
SELECTED CROUP EXHIBITIONS
- Chilenas, Kunsttamtes Kreuzberg, Berlin.
1997
1982
- BlliNNIAI.. Exhibition at the Whitney IVIuseum of Ame rica n Art, New York.
- Womeu of the Americas, Center for Inter American Rd,Hinns/1\mcricas
1996 Society, New York.
- tMidc tlw VISIIJLEcuratcd by i'vl . Catherine de Zeghcr, Institute of ContcmpomryArt.
1981
Bo!.ton; travelling to 1he Narion<ll l\'luseurn of V\bmen in the Art�. \·\��;h�ngton, D.C..
- Latiu A111ericau Video, t\ l useum of t\lodcrn Art. Nc'' Yorl..
1he V.'hirechapcl Art Gallet); London. and theArt G.:tllcry of \\\!stem Au�tr.1lia. Penh
Ikon & Logos, Altem:�t ive i\luseum, New Yorl...
1994 u, Colombia.
- Bieowl de i\lledelli

- ar-ti-cu-la-te, t.lary Delahoyd Callery, New \ork. - INBO Bien11l, Cochabamoo. Bolhia.
1992 1 974
- Anreri<:n. Bride oftl�e Suu, 500yamofl..atinAmeriamAI1. cumtL..! by i\1. Catherine - Arts Festiml For DemccrtiCJ in Cltile, Ro).:tl CoiiL'jl,e of An. London.
vi $1;L.ECTEO CRITICAL BIBLIOGRAPHY (on poetry) - Cecilia l'icmia in Hora de Poesia. \1 3 1 . Barcelona, Spain, 198-1
- 1\'larcelo Coddou, Una nota sobre Prect�rio/Precarious de Cecilitl Victllltt in
Jill S. Kuhnheim. 1lwl$1urtional Hispanicizy: Fl<'l.dit�g Glolxtl Culture in 1i•e•lfic111 Ceu· El Sur, Concepd6n, Chile 1984.
tmy Liwmwre, a scholarly and criticnl joum11l, Hofs1rn Univc'Sity, New York, Fall 1996. - Jainw M�nrique Ardila. Cows Ntttumles, 1111 liiJro de poe11ws de Cecilia
i
-A111onio Sk.irmcta, La Vihmia Poctica in Rc•,istt• Uuil'cJ'Sitarit! # 5 1 Primc.-a Viculla in E/ Espect.ador Magazi n Dominica!. Bogota , October 1979.
cntrega. Santiago 1996. - Alfonso Alcalce. V isi-611 Poetica de Chile, in Lil11·o del A1io I 973, Sanliaj.\o
- Luis Vargas Sa a vedra, Una Vicwlu eu Nueva \ork, El Mercurio. Revis!a de de Chile, 1973 .
Ubros. Santiago 1 8 Feb., 1996.
- Christine de Lailhacar, 11•eMesti=o as CntctiJ!e, Studies inModem Poetry \bl 5 •

CRITICAL. 818LIOCRAPHY (on art)

Peter Lang Pub�shing. New )ork, 1996.
- ,\larjorie Perloff. Afterimages: Ret'Olution of the (Visible) Word in Sulfur -Jacqueline Barnit:Z.. XXtlr Century Art of l..atm America. University of TcxJS
#37, f-all 1995. Press. 1997.
- Rachel Blau du Plessi s, Noticing s in Sulfur # 34, Ypsillanti, �lich., - 1\tCatherine de Zegher, Cect!w Vic mias Ou,.rage: Knot a Not, Notes as
Spring 1994. Knot� (�hort version), in IIISide tire Visible, A11 Elliptical Traverse of lOti.
- Hugo Mende1 Ramirez, Unral'elliug H0rds tmd tlw \M!aving of Wat er in Centm)' Art, ill, of and from tire Feminine. Ed it ed by 1\1. Catherine de Zeghcr.
flwk•w: Llltiu Awe.-ican Literature a11tl Arts 1148. New York. Spring 1994. ·me M.I .T Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts and Londo n, 1996.
- Marguerite Feitlowitz, Precarious in The Amcrictm Voice, 1993. - M. Catheri ne de Zegher, Cccilin ViCtllia's Om•ra,ge: K11ot a Not, Notes /IS
- Blanco Elena Pantin, Mi filiaci6n cou Ia poesfa (interview) in E/ Diorio de f(,wts (�ho1·t version). in Geriemtion., mul Geogrtr)Jiiies in tl1e \lisuul Arts,
Camcas.june 1 . 1993. Feminist Readings, edited by Griselda Pollock, Rou tledge, London, 1996.
Eliol Weinberger, Evel)·tlling Dead Tretubles, imroductory essay to - Mara H. Wittling, Cecilia \!icmia, in llo•ci11g Today's Visions, Writiugs IJ}'
Unrat'lllling HtJrtds & tl1e ���avin,g of 1-\kller, Graywolf Press. 1992. Contemporary \,\0men Artists, Unherse Publishing. New York. 1994.
- Soledad Bianchi, Un recorrido entre silencios, in La Epoca. Literatura y - Lawrence Rinder, Cecilia Vicmia, in El t\ude Futuro. Uni,·ersil)' Art
Libros Ai\o Ill, #138. Dec. 2. 1990. 1\luseum. Berkeley. California, 1993.
-Acerca de Cecilia Viconw y Ia Tribu No, po�rou desde aquel ayer ya Iantos - Luc) R.Lippard. Cecilia Vicuna. HJ!audo Iafibra comtifl, in Arte
arios, 111 Poesfa Chilena, Mimdas, Enfoques, Apomtes, Documetllas. Santiago de lmernacioual, #18, Re�ista del i\luseo de Arte 1\loderno de Bogota, 1994.
Chile, 1990. - Carin Kuoni, Nuclrtcrlreit mul ldealisnws: Exit Art . . . in Kunstforum
- Agrupaciones Literarias de Ia dec11da del sesenttl in RL'Vista Chilena de # 1 18 , Ilerlin, Germany, 1992.
Li tera tura, N 33, Santiago 1989. - Fatima Bercht, Cecilia Vic111i", Documeflt in Wool, in America. Bride of
- Luisa Ulibarri Cecilia Vicwia, una machi eu Nueva l'Orh, i n La Epoca, tile Suu. 500 Years Latin America m1d tl.e Low Cou n t ries. Edited by M.
Litemtw·a y LiiJTos, Santiago. Sept 3, 1989. Catherine de Zegher and Paul Vandcnb•·occk, Royal Museum of Fine Ans,
- Mario Lucarda , La Wik'111'1a, in Quimera, N 94, Barcelona. 1989. Antwerp. Belgium, 1992.
- Palabra111ms de Cecilia Vic.ww in Hom cle Poesfa, N 43, Barcelona, Spain, 1986. �co, 1992.
- El iot Weinberger, Basuriws/Uttle Litter, in �liL'!>1er #3, Civdad de i\.Je.
vii - Calvin Reid. Multi-Site ExhibitiOfiS, Inside-Outside. in Art in Amer�ca, New - Lucy R. Lippard. Get the i\!le5Sllge?. E. P. Dutton. New York. 198-1.
York, january 1991. - Milan h·elic y Gaspar Galaz, La Pinrum err Clrile. Universidad Cat6lica
- k\lichaei Kimmelman, Tire Force of Conl'iction Stirred by tire 80s, in de Valparaiso, Chile, 1981.
The Ne" York Times, May 27, 1990. -Antonio Romera, Pirrturas de Cecilia Vicmia, El k\lercurio. $.1ntiago de
-K
im Levin, Cecilia Vrcuria at Exit Art, Tire Village Voice, New York. i\ lay Chile, 24 Diciembre, 1972.
9-15, 1990.
-julia P. Herzberg, Re-membering ldentit): Vision of Connectrons, in Tire
SELECTED RECORDINGS AND VrDEO DOCUMENTATION
Decode Slrow, New i\luseum, New York, 1990.
-Jacqueline Barnirz, Lati>r American Artists in New l'<>rk since I 970, Archer 1996 Charles Bernstein imervie\\S Cecih a Vicuila, LINEbreak, radio program.
J\1. Huntington An Gallery, University of Texas at Austin, 1987. SUNY Buffalo.
- Lucy R. Lippard, Tire llicuiia and tire Leopard, a COI1l'erstrtion witlr Cecilia
Vicroia, in Red Bass Internat-ional. Tallahassee. Florida 1986.
viii Biograp hical Notes on the Authors

Esther Allen Hugo Mendez-Ramirez

has published translations of Blaise Cendrars (University of Nebraska Press) and is a literary critic and professor of Spanish at Georgia State University. His publica­
Octavio Paz (Copper Canyon Press). She recentI)• received an N.E.A. grant for her tions include articles on Gabriel Garcia 1\ohlrquez. Jorge Luis Borges, and the
forthcoming translation of Rosario Castellanos's Book of Lomerttations (Penguin). Mexican poet Juan Jose Tablada.

Regina Harrison Kenneth Sherwo�d

a litera•)' critic and anthropologist, is a specialist in poetry and anthropology and has is researching The Audi/1le Word in 1il•entiet/, Centw)' American Poet•)' as a PhD
written extensively on m)•thopoesis, modes of discourse, and the Quechua oral tra­ candidate in the Poetics Program at SUI\!\' Buffalo, where he also edits rhe online
dition. She is the author of the pioneering study of women's oral tradition, Signs, literary journal RIF!T'. He has published critical essays on David Antin and George
Songs and. Memory• in the Andes (University of Texas, 1989: translated imo Spanish Oppen. and is presently co-transla ting a volume of poetry by Severo Sarduy. His !�t­
and published by Abya-Yala, Ecuador, 1994), and True Confessions (University of est poetry chapbook, That Risl<, appeared in I 996 from Meow Press.
Maryland, 1992). She currently teache.s Latin i\merican liteature r at the University
of Maryland. Nl. Catherine de Zegher
is an art historian and archaeologist. In 1988, she became the director of the Kanaal
Billie Jean Isbell i\rt Foundation, a centre of contemporay art, opting for self-willed, uncompromising
an ethnologist and playwright, has written extensively on gender as cultural con­ projects with <ln international imanation (�.0. Cildo Meireles. Tadashi Kawamata,
struction, the feminine symbolic, democracy and '�olcnce, and culture and perfor­ Mona Hatoum, Everlyn Nicodemus, Gabriel Orozco . . .). In 1992 she cocurated
mance. She is the author of To Defend Ourselves: Ecology and Ritual in an Andean (with Paul Vandcnbroeck} the exhibition "America: Bride of the Sun. 500 Years
Village (University of Texas Press. 1978: translated into Spanish and published by Latin America and the Low Countries." At the Institute of C011temporary Art.
Siglo XXI, Mexico), and the forthcoming Public Secrets from Peru and Malting Boston, she curated in I 996 the exhibition "Inside the Visible: An Elliptical ll·averse
Cult-ure and Histo•)' in the Andes. She currently teaches anthropology at Cornell of. 20th Centul)' Art, in, of, and from the Feminine" (exhib. cat. published by i\l.l.T.
University. Press. Cambridge, Mass. and London).

Lucy R. Lippard
is a pioneering author and feminist art historian. i\mong her landmark title.s are
Et•o Hesse; Overlay: Contemporay Art and t.he Art of Prehistory; Get. the Message? A
Decade ofArt for Social Clu:mge; and Mixeti Blessings, New A11 ·i11 a Mnlticult.ural
America. She currently lives in New lvlexico and lectures widely in the United
States and abroad.
ix Index

abstract, abstraction, abstractness 8, 13, 20, 34, Arica 34, 49 Boas. Frunz 18
36, 37,51 ;1rt.c pove•·a 33. 38 Bogota 7 9, 12. 23. 30, 5 1 . 53
Aconcogua River 20 artifact(ual) 34, 6 1 , 63, 68, 74, 92 Bolivar. Simon 1 2
activist 53 artifice 33 Bolivia 19. 52
Albers, Anni 26, 27, 3 1 Arts Festival for Democracy 7 Book of John 66
Allende (President Salvador) 7, 9, 22, 37 Atitl�n, Atliteco 19 Borges. Jorge Luis 29. 59. 64. 65
alt>aca(s) 7. I I, 50 Atlantic 33 Borgesinn 69
America (Latin, North, South) 7-9, 13. 1-1, 19. 23, avant-garde 37 Boullee, Etienne-Louis 20
2-1, 27-29. 3 1 . 37. 38, 5 1 , 59, 60, 68. 70. 8-1 Aymara 40 Brazil 1-1, 37-39
Americanization 5 1 backstrap 28 Breit, Guy 7, 22. �8
Amerindian 27. 59, 60 banner(s) 8, 1 3 , 2� brocade 2 5. 28
Ancient Word 25 Barcelona 36 Brown, Judith 19
Andalucfa 50 Barthes, Roland 52 Rrooklyn Museum 13
Andes, Andean, Andean-ness 7. 9, I 0, I I . l. i- 15, l:lasho 1 4 Buddhism 14
17, 19. 24-27, 3 1 , 33, 34, 37. 40. 47-57. Basque 14, 50 Buddist 62
59-61, 64, 67, 69, 76, 78, 79, 82-86, 89 basuritas 14, 21 Buenos i\i•·cs 14, 29, 33
anthology. anthologized 33, 5 I . 62 Bauhaus 26 Buffalo 80. 84
anthropological, anthropologist, amhropology 18, Bec<.1uer, Gustavo Adolfo 59 Cabral de l\ lelo Neto. Joao 55
57. 67. 75-77 Beguinage Saint-Eliz.�bcth 39 Cage, John I-I
Anthero 17, 18,47 Bello, Andres 59 Candei.Iria 7, 23
aphonsm 63 Benot. Eduardo 60 cam•as 9
apocalyptic 70 Bergman, Ciel 1 4 Cardenal, Emesto 59
applique 28 Berkeley Art IVIuseum I I Castille 29
apu. apus 7, 54 Berlo, Janet Catherine 27 Castro, Ami lear de 37
archaeolog
ical, archaic 12, 3 1 , 63 Betye 1 4 Castro, Fidel 9
Argentina, Argentine 8, I 0, 19, 29, 62 hod)' art 33 eat's cradle 1 8
X Cenotaph 20 Cornell U niversi ty 5 1 , 57 Durham. Jimmie 14
ccq'c 83, 93 Corominas, Joan 63 Eagleton. James 74, 78
Cerro Santa Lucia 30 cosmogony 66 eurth 19-2 1 . 24. 31 . 48-52, 54, 55, 61 , 73, 79. 92
Chenalho 19 COIIOn 40, 56 Earth Mother 47
Chile, Chilean 7-9. I I , 14, 15, 1 7 , 19-23, 29-.� I , coup d'etat 60 eclectic 60
33. 35. 37. 38. so. 51-53. 60. 62 coyote 8 Eculldor 1 9
Chinchcro 3 I Crccley, Robert 88 Egypt 40
Chnst of 1\'lontscr:ll 12 cross, crux I I . 12, 20, 30 Ehl'cnJx,rg., Felipe 60
Chungara 49 cryptic 59, 66. 68 embroidery, embroidering I I . 28
C.I.A.60 Cuha(n) 67 enamorJdos 53. 54
circulaci6n 84 cubist 61 enciclopeda
1 dd asco 22
Cixous, HE!I�ne S I cuerdas 84 English 29. 56. 57. 6 1 , 80. 82. 87. 90, 9 1
Clark. Lygia 2 1 . 33, 37, 38, 4 1 Cuzco 49, 83, 92 entanglement 30
cloth(ing) 10. 1 9 , 24, 27, 3 1 , 36, 6 1 dada'ism 36, 3 7. 60 epigl'aph 62. 67. 89. 92
Cochabnmba 52 Damon, Betsy 14 epiphany. cpiphanic 63, 64. 67
collage 28, 60. 61. 63, 69 Darfo. Ruben 59 epistemology 76
Colombia, Columbian 7, 10, 12, 14, 23. 34, 35, 37 Daumal, Rene 54 Eskimo 1 8
combinaciones elocutivos 60, 63 degre zero 64 esp<tnol82
commissure 53 Delaware River I I ethnogmphcr(s) 75
c::ompadrazgo 55 Deleuze, Gilles 30, .H. 85 ethnography 88
complcmentaria I 5 Derricote. Toi 80 ethnopoetics 77
Con·c6n I I , 20, 21 Derrid(e)a(n) 74 etymolog)� etymological 18. 19, 54. 55. 63. 66.
concrete, concretist (neo-) I 3, 37, 39 detritus I0, I I 79, 82
congresos 27 dichotomization. dichotomy 27, 74, 76, 78, 80. Europe(an) 18, 33, 37, 38, 4 1 . 50, 5 1 , 5-l, 59-6 1 ,
conncction(s) I I. 3 1 . 56, 60 82,85 69, 70,82. 84, 86-88
conquistn. conquistadores 27. 34 drawing I I , 17, 18, 24, 52 Exit A1·t. New )'Q,·k S, I 0, 12, 1 3
COI1Struclivism 37 Drucker, Johanna 74. 78 expre�sionism 36
cordillew 54 Duchamp , Marcel 38, 39 fabric (:mti·) I 0, 18, 26- 28. 30-32
Co1·man. Cid 14 Dugger, John 7, 22 fastening I 0
xi feather{s) I0-12, 2 1 . 48 Hammons, David 14 lridesce 68, 87. 89
i
feminine 5 1 Hannover 34 Irgaray, Luce 5 I
Fcnolloso. Ernesto 55. 66 haptic 30 Isbell, [lillie Jean 48
fenil it y I I , 52, 55 Harbury. Jennifer II Italian. l tolionism( s} 29, 38
fibcr(s) 7, J8, 26, 30, 56 Harrison, Regina 48, 67, 68, 79 Jacob, l\llary Jane 26
Finneg1111, Huth 75 Hatunsimi 19, 63 jaguar 13
Flemish 40 l leidegger, Martin 62 Jardim, Bcynoldo 37
France 50 Helms, Mary W. 27 Jimene7, Juan Ram6n 59
Francis (Saint) I I Hemisphere (Southern ) 22, 24 Junta 21
French 1\rt i\luseum 50 hieroglyph(s) 85 juxtapose, juxtapo�uion I 0, 68, 70
French Revolution(ary) 20 hilaci6n 84 Khata 3 1
Futurist(s) 22 Hilumbres. hilollumbre 39, 40 Kijllu 1 2
Galapagos 5 0 Hispanic 59, 69 knot 26. 33-35. 56. 83.89
Gaudi. Antoni 36 Hochschule for Gcstaltung 37 Kon-tik
i 12
Cego (Gertrude Goldschmidt) 39 Holt, Nancy 20, 21 Kortrijk 39
geometric 1 7 . 37, 48, 73 l lomeric 75 Krauss. Rosalind 3 I . 32
German, Germany 29, 35-37 huaca 79, 80, 83 Kuna 27
Golub, Leon 23 !Judson River 12, 60 land art 20, 2 1 , 33
Craywolf Press 8 l luidobro, Vicente 22. 55, 59. 62. 64 language 14, 18, 19, 2 1 , 24, 25, 28, 29, 33-35. 37 ,
Great-Brot.ain 22 hu ipi les 19 �I. 5 1 , 5 5 . 56, 59, 62-68, 70, 74, 76. 78. 79,
grouo 16 hybrid 69, 74, 78 8 1 , 82,84,85.89,92
Guatemala 26 iconicity 82 Lenin, Vladimir 9
Guanari. f-�lix 30. 33, 85 Iglesia de Ia Colonia Coell 36 Levine. Suzanne Jil l ;3
Guill�n. Jorge 59 Inca. lncan 15. 19. 34, 49, 54, 6 1 , 67, 79 Lichtenberg Ettinger, Brncha 41
Cullar, Ferreira 37 incan tation 82 light 10. 1 1 . 17,20,26, 40.64. 67. 68.87.89
guru 52 India, lndian(s) 14. 19. 24. 27. 52. 82. 86, 88, 89 Lima 85-88
llacldon. Kathleen 24 Institute of Contemporary Art 22 Lima, Jose Letomo 60. 67, 87, 89
haecccities 30 intertwine(d) 18 , 26. 30 linguistic 20, 28, 3 1 . 38, 54, 67, 69, 76, 78, 87
haiku(s) 14, 69 interweave/woven 18 literacy. literate 74, 75, 78, 85
xii Jl�ma 7, 49 , 56 metaphysical 59, 67 Oiticicn. Helio 37, 38
lliqlla 48 metr<m1orphosis 4 I Olson, ChHrles 77, 85
Lluta 34 i\ lexico 26 omclc(s) 67
locus. lol-.1 I 0, I I l\lichau�. llcnri 20 oro!, oraluy. ornlize (re·) 7�-80. 82. 85. 87. 88
London 7-9. 1 3, 15, 22,23 �liro. joan H Oriental 59
Long, Richard 2 1 i\llstml. Gabriela 48 oriri 53
loom(cd) 19, 26, 28, 3 1 , 90 1\'lobius 4 1 ouvrage 20, � I
Lord. Albert 74, 75, 77, 85 modernism, modernity 3 1 -33, 37, 41 P;�cific Ocean 20
1\ll ai ne 12 molo 27 painting 24, 26, 3 1 , 36, 4 1 , 6 1 , 80
Manifesto 37, 39 Mollepampa 34 Pt1labra c hilo 1 3 , 25
mantra(s) 67 l\ londriaan. Pict 38 P.1lnbrurmas 1 3, 54, 62-64 , 66-68, 78, 79
l\lapocho I I . 50 .\1ountain Deities -17 P'dbbra Sur 8
�lapuchel�. 29, 30, 5 2 i\luseo Chtlcno de Arte Precolombmo 34 palindrome(s) 15. 63
� lartfnez. l\ lanuel Gonzalez 59 1\lusco Nactonal de Bellas Artes 1 2, 50 Panama 27
i\larx(ist) 37 myth, mythcme, 11l)•thic(al), mythographer 9, 1 3, ponthetsllc 65
masculine 5 1 18, 29. 59, 68, 73, 74, 76. 77. 78. 8D-82, Pape. L)'&ia 37
matrilineal, ma triliny 5 1 , 14 85-87, 92 paroblc(s) 67
matri� 30, -II Nahuatl 62 Pnracas 1 3
Maya, Mnyun 25-28, 40 85 N,otional l\luseum of Fine Arts 22 paradigm n. 4 1 , 49, 5 1 , 80
l\ lazatec 7-1 necropohs 13 Paris 36
�lazenud. Dominique 1 4 Neruda. Pablo 48, 59. 6 1, 67 PaiT3, Nicanor 59
i\ledalla. David 7, 22 nest(s) 10. 18. 29. 38 Parra, Violct.l 9. 23. 29. 4 1 . 6 1
Meireles. Cildo 39 New Critical, New Criticism 74, 76, 78 Parry. William 7-1
menhir 24 Newton 20 P<olernosto, Cesar 8
Men., Merzbau, ausmerzen 34-36, 60 New York 8, 1 2, 1 4 . 30. 39. 48. 80 patri Ii ny 48
mesh(ed), meshwork 1 8 iiipa(s) 1 7 paucrn 17, 18, 26.' 28, 3 1 , 47, 69
mestizo(s) 8. 9, 23, 24, 30, 53, 85 nonfigumtive 37 Paz. Octavio 52, 53, 59, 65
metaphor{icall iO, I I , 13, 19. 20, 28, 38. -II, 47, Nueva Cancion Chilena 23 Pot, La -19
50, 5 1 . 57. 6 1 , 6-1-66. 68, 82 Ody�seu� 31 Pedrosa, l\lario 37
Xlll Penelope 3 1 prosopopeia 68 Sagrada Familia (La) 36
peninsula 1 3 protean 60 Saiu, 'Edw:ll'd W. 3 5
performance (art) 23. 28. 60. 74, 77, 78, 80, 8 1 , Proteus 7 5 S<!limls, Pedro 59
85,88 pun 90 Saltet· Island 1 2
Peru, Peruvian I 0, 13, 1 4 , 19, 26, 27, 3 1 . 40, 64. Purmamarca 49, 73, 92 San Fernando 1 9 , 30
67,86 Quechua I I , l 2, J 9, 3 J , 52, 56, 62, 68, 69, 79, 82, Sanskrit I I, 54, 62
Petit PahliS 50 83,90 S:111t<1 Barbara 14
p honetic 66 Quiche 25 Santa Fe 1 4
Picasso, Pablo 14 Quilapayim 7 S<tntiago 7 , 8, I I , 12, 19, 22, 28, 30, 34. 50-54.86
Pinochet, Augusto (General) 7, 14. 15, 53 quipu .1 5 , 33. 34-36, 83-85,89 Santiago. Marfa 8
pirka 30 Ramirez 50 S<tussure, Ferdinand ; Saussurean 78
Pistacho I Pishtako 86, 87 randa 40 Sao P:wlo 38, 39
Plomo, El 54, 5 5 Randall, Robert 54 Schwitters, Kun 14. 34-38, 60
poesis 78 realism 37 scrap(s) I 0, 61
Poetry Society of Americ<1 92 recorcl<ll' 84 sculpturt• 8. I I, 13, 26
politic(al) I I , 22-24, 26, 27, 53. 70 refuse I I, 2 I, 36, 60 segue 91
pollera 48 Renaissance 3 I semantic 63
Pollock, Griselda 4 1 rhetorical 68 se\·v, sewin� 19
Pom<l, Guaman 49, 52 riddle 54-56 Shaman, sh<tman 1 3 . 62. 67. 74
poncho 3 1 , 56, 6 1 , 64 Rig Veda 63. 66 shell(s) 10. 12. 2 1 . 38. 8 1
Popol Vuh 25, 63, 66 Rio de Janeiro 38 Slade School of Fine Arts, London 22
Popular Unity 7 ritual l0-13, 52, 55, 67, 69 Socrates 84, 85
Portugal, portugese 38 Romantic 75 Solar, Xul 29. 41
posl·modern 60 Rothenberg. Jerome 77 sophistication 5 1
prayer 10. 1 5 , 20, 2 1 , 47, 89, 90 Royal College of Art, London 7 space, spatialized 10, 1 3 , 17, 20, 28, 30-33.
prccario(s), precarious(ness) 8-15, 20. 2 1 . 24. rubbish 8, I I . 14, 60 38-4 1 ,47. 6 1
34-36, 38. 60-62 , 6 7 , 84 Rupp, Christy 1 4 Spaniards. Sp<lnish 7, 9, 14, 29, 48, 50, 56, 79,
Primitive art (sub·) 27 Saar.. Alison 14 80.82,85. 88-91

proletariat 9 Sabina. 1\ll:trla 74 Spanudis. Theon 3 7

xiv spin, spindle, spine, spinning, spun 13-IS. 19, 30. Tlatclolco 53 Vallejo. Cesar 48
48, 53, 57, 79 thread, threadness 7 , 10, I I , 13-15, 17, 18, 20, vanguardistas 29
swnza 87 2 1 , 24-28, 30, 34, 36, 39, 40, 47, 48, 5 1 , 5 6, Van Tongerloo, Georges 38
stitch, stitching 40 62, 82, 83, 89, 92 Vargas, Kathy 14
stone 10, 1 1 , 17, 19, 20, 2 1 , 24, 25, 30, 38, 47, Tihet(an) 1 3 Vater, Regina 14
48, 51 Tirado, Wolf 8 Vedic 21
Strand, Mark 56 Titicaca Lake 1 5 Vega, Garcilaso da Ia 79
strand(s) 19 totem, totemic, toternism 48, 68 Venezuelan 3 9
Strauss, Claude-Levi 24, 25, 76, 77, 8 1 transcendent(al) 14 · vicuf\a 7, 48-50
string 17, 18, 24, 26, 3 0 , 36, 38, 60, 61, 84, 85, Treno 1 4 Virgin Mary 19
89 tribe, No Tribe, Tribu No 19, 22, 24, 53 vortex 1 3
subterranean 50, 52 trim 28 warp 1 7, 24-26, 3 1 , 62
surrealism, surrealist(s) 22, 39, 5 2 Turkey 40 water 7, I I , 12. 1 7 . 1 8 , 20, 26. 38. 47. 48. 5 1 , 52.
symbolic, symbolization 25, 4 1 , 5 J twine 18, 1 9 . 2 6 56. 69. 70. 83. 87. 90
syncretic 9 typography 78 '"'eave, '"''eaver, weaving. weft. woof. wove(n)
syntax 28, 76, 77 Tzutujil Maya 19 IQ-15, 1 7-1 9, 23-31 , 33, 34, 36, 38-40, 47.
Tanam Press 8 Ukeles, Laderman Mierle 1 4 56, 57, 59. 6 1 . 62. 64, 67, 73, 84, 87-90
Taoism 14 Ulm 37 Weinberger, Eliot 48, 52, 74
tapestry 1 3 unanch;mi 5 6 Weissmann Franz 37
Tawantinsuyu 34 uncanny 55 West(ern) I I . 24, 27. 33, 60, 62. 69, 70, 74
Tai Chi 49 unfolding 67 whol'i 48
Tedlock, Dennis 77 Unidad Popul(or 37 wood 10, 12, 14. 36
textile(s 10-13, 19, 20, 25-28, 31, 33, 40, 62 unravel, unravelling I I, 47, 56, 60-64, 67, 69, 70, wool, woolen 7, 30, 34, 48, 56, 83
texture 28, 56 73, 79, 80, 87 yarn I I . 1 2 . 1 5 . 17, 19, 30, 47, 48, 5 1

With thanks to Arlette Libeer.

xv Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the many people who contributed to make this work possible throughout the years,
and most specially to Nemesio Antunez, Sergio Mondrag6n, Felipe Ehrenberg, Carla Stellweg,
Lucy Lippard, Eliot \!\Ieinberger, Pamela Clapp, Emily Todd, Jeanette lngberman and Papo Colo,
Lawrence Rinder, Suzanna Tamminen, and Esther Allen.
qui pOem
•

Cecilia Vi cufi.a

trcmslatecl by Esther Allen

This autobiography in debris
is for Cesar Paternosto,
Catherine de Zegher,
and Jorge and Norma de Vicuna,
It is also for Rogelio, el hombre que pensaba demasiado.
To them, my gratitude.
Trailed out, this fluttering thread of life:

no use saying it's tethered to the very

source of earth's life-bringing change.

- Meng Chiao
trans. David Hinton
 -- ----

-theheartofmemory, --
the earth , listening to us.

q. I I
The ear is a spiral
to hear
a sound within

An empty furrow
to receive

A standing stick
to speak

Piercing earth and sky

the sign begins

To write from below, seeing the efface.

q.J2
Con-con, Chile, 1966

q.13
The tide erased the work as night completes the clay.
Con-c6n, Chile, I 967

"15
 \.:. \ -t �
..-
o
t "' � r
.s
.{e... �

Qf
� ,.N' I st--
u
�
-$'
'R V'e,
'< r �
(f
.r lr
� "

�s
-a (0 �
� ro ,...-

0
""' ?
.s

'J'�ta-,
('�

,,{r �c./
<-<

t v v� ,...
:.. s
"'.t,
r" t'

-- �
-.r q
)(.
"

"
b
�
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s
·

""�
,

'< ...
�
...
,

"'
s
_)'"'
()

�
f.
..."' -(. oo
;><.

q./6
the sole

touched

the ground

the ground

touched

the foot

the foot's

knowledge

was born

in the meeting

of the sole's lines

and the earth's

cracks

q.J7
It all began in the dust.

I walked to school on a dirt road, sinking my feet

into floury dust.

Playing at making my tracks a marking.

q.l!l
Later, l lay down on an empty street to feel as the pavement feels,

the thunder of cars approaching

Santiago's double river

coming down the mountains

river of ca rs, river of water

q.J9
We spent so much time in the huge buses we called "micros" that I 12Iayed at makjng the

ride into a journey,

not a going between here and there but a being in.

I imagined the life of a passenger from beginning to end.

The least distraction and the passenger would return to the oblivion she emerged from.

'vVe "'ere travelling on a voyage of oblivion,

oblivious to our unity

at once together and separate

in a state of trans
a transitory pact

called "bus ride."

Las Basuritas de Con-con.

A basket's butt and debris from Con-c6n began filling my parents' yard.

Santiago, 1968
 Santiago, 1966 ( 1994)

The Glove

During a bus ride I would raise a hand gloved in a glove begloved.

The glove is not a glove, but a primordial mythic being.

(The bus too, moves in primordial mythic time.)

When a girl is born, her mother puts a spider in her hand,

to teach her to weave.

The memory of the journey unravelling.

 antiago, 1968 ( 1994)

The Circular

In Chile, government offices would send a letter "to everyone"

called a "circular" (but rectangular, nevertheless).

Disrupting the line at the post office.

I sent my friends triangular, trapezoidal and circular letters.

The shift in the rhythm of gazes set the circular in motion.

The letter is the poet s lifeline.

'

The poem is the earth's circulation. q.23

"Tired of my room's normality, I have criss-crossed it with a blue thread ...

q.24
 taut and geometrical as a sky to communicate with other worlds."

Stupid Diary, Con-c6n, January 22, I 972 q.25

 I tied up my boyfriend and wound myself in a net:

q.26
 Santiago, 1970-1971

Life and death are knotted in a thread

the hanged man's rope,
and the umbilical cord.

q.27
 On Behalf of Seeds

I proposed a day of the seed to Salvador Allende: seedbeds greening

the rooftops and squares into forests and gardens, cities and fields into edens.

Allende laughed and said pensively: "maybe by the year two thousand."

E ver y year I gathered and planted seeds.

vVhen the small trees reached 20 em I gave them away.

The seed's steps:

gathering many seeds in one place

to watch and watch over seeds.

Only a collective gesture of love can turn back destruction.

I q.28
(The forests, cut down and burned.)
 The seed has waited all this time to seed.

Sprouting and waiting they are.

Some wait three thousand years, others a few minutes.

Keepers of an inner time, they know when to jump.

Some have parachutes, others weight.

Ever� seed is a space ship, a nomad planet w�iting to_sprout.

Santiago, 1971

q.29
Autumn

First I tried to capture spring, but the petals

rotted. The leaves from the trees, though,
were hardier.

I wanted to keep them before they were swept up or burned,

not out of a desire to make them eternal, but as an act of folly.

Several million years after the creation

of autumn and a few years after the creation
of the plastic bag, I decided to keep autumn
in a bag.

Consciousness of your own death brings a new vision

of time.
A work dedicated to delight wants to make the urgency
of the present, which is the urgency of the revolution, palpable.

In June 1971 I filled the Forestal Gallery of the National Museum of Fine Arts in

Santiago, Chile, with leaves.

I gathered the leaves with the help of the gardeners in the parks.

Large trucks brought them to the museum.

My mother and I pushed them into the gallery, which l ooked like a dark brown sea.

At the back of the room, the text "Autumn diary" narrated the work in reverse, begin­

ning with the last day.

Dedicated to the construction of socialism in Chile, "Autumn" lasted t hree days.

(C. Bertoni and N. Antunez collaborated. No photos were taken.)

q.30
q 31
The Bank of Ideas

-Through a common friend, I sent Salvador Allende a proposal to create a

Bank of Ideas, to collect and carry- out the best ideas in the country. Allende
laughed and said: "Chile isn't ready."

- I began to compile an Encyclopedia of Disgust, a document of the abjection,

violence and injustice in which we lived: no one contributed to it, everyone
thought our era was the Encyclopedia of Disgust.

-1 started a Dictionary of Come-ons and Insults. taking notes as I walked

around Santiago with my friends.

- l made several "Museums of Hair and Fingernails" in shoeboxes. All were

destroyed.

The sum total of our thoughts creates the world.

(The Chile of that time made this thinking possible.)

"Extraordinary persons we arc NOT,

lt is because of the thoughts of our Sun Father that
we K OW THESE THINGS,"
said Andrew Peynetsa narrating the Zuni
creation myth.

q.33
A Diary of Objects for the Resistance

AfLer the attempted coup of June, 1973, I began keeping a journal of

debris, little prayers;
the diary of a life in litter.

q.3-l
 London, 1973

q.35
 "For the Papago pilgrim, it was possible to bring back a
token, a strand of seaweed, a shell, or a pebble that he
noticed while he was at the edge of the world."

- Dennis and Barbara Tedlock

The poverty of the thread

was the limit
and edge
of the world
was any
mumenl.

q.36
-----
-

London. 1973

q.37
q.38
 London, 1973

q.39
"I passed into the social space," this object said, repeating the slogans of

the time, "from private to communal property."

A cargo of miniatures in cigarette wrappings,

"mental newspapers" to combat the CIA's lies.

London, 1973

q.40
 f ..19-<:C
r

Weft of incense sticks: maximum fragility

against maximum power.

London, 1973

q.41
The Black Page of a Black Book.

The coup fell like a drop of blood into the void.

If Chile had had the power of collectively dreaming another

possibility,
the coup interrupted the dreaming.

Of the world that had been there remained only

a few photos, the books burned,
the b odies disappeared.

q.44
London, 1973

q.45
 Chile, 1973

q.46
Chile, 1973

q.47
Watching the news of the Vietnam war on TV
I saw the suffering that would come to us.

1 tied a red handkerchief around m y wrist

and wore it day and night
until it was frayed and torn.

Chile, 1967

q.48
Homage to Vietnam, London 1975

q.49
What is Poetry to You?

High in the mountains outside the city of Bogota, at precipice's

edge, I found a giant plaster typewriter: it was the "Monument
to the Press"

The film What is Poetry to You? would begin with this image.

A few days later I went back but the typewriter had been stolen,
only an empty pedestal was left.

q.50
Bogota, March 1980

q.51
 f
1.
I

The film asked prostitutes, passers-by, beggars and policemen, "What is poetry to you?"

In the brothel: We arrived early one aftern oon to interview t he girls. At first they refused to take part in
the film. They didn't want to be seen there; many were housewives and mothers and had to hide the nature
of their profession. But when we explained that the film was about poetry, not pro stit ution, and that many
different kinds of p eople were bei ng interviewed, t hey agreed t o do it .
M's answer: "I think poetry is what every one of us feels in his or her own self, that lovely thing you have
inside, for me th at' s poetry. I've read very little poetry, but 1 feel this, for me this is poetry, what you feel for
every being you love, the tenderness a mothe r feels for a child or, s ay, when a woman is in love she feels this
tenderness, yes, it's like a romance, or something like that. That's what I think. At least, when you look at a
flower you feel i nside yourself this desi re to hold it, like when you have a child and you feel this tenderness
towards the child, that to me is poetry, the inner tenderness you have hidden inside, at the bottom of your
soul, like the little birds, like the tend ern ess Dona Cecilia felt yesterday for the little birds over t her e, poet­
ry's exactly like that, the pleasure of seeing innocent animals. All that is poetry.
"Or when you watch a brook flowing, and see the purity of the water, for m e that's something so natural,
so pure, and I feel it's something very lovely."
" Do you think poetry is something that is written?"
"['Jo, ins pired. "
"'vVhat do you mean, inspired?"
". .. well, when poets are going to write a book about poetry, first t hey'r e inspired, right? By someone, a
tree, a person, a plant, a flower, I imagine that's what happens.
"For m e, poetry is something very lovely, very important, and above all very fundamental in a person's, a
human being's life . . . a distant place where th ere are no ca rs making loud noises, only trees, animals, if I'm
ever inspired, 1 know I'll make great poetry out of it, to write down or record, but here, in all this, no,
because r ight now my mind is on money, that's all."
"But there can be poetry in that too..."

q.52
 "Ri ght, of cou rs e, there can be poetry in everything, even in feel ings, especially, and in every act you
make, carry out, think and desire, no? there can even be poetry in sex, yes, hmmmm."
"What do you mean?"
"For example, I'm doing it, making love with a client, I can be inspired and make a poem out of it, out of
:ny act at that moment, yes, of course, like I said."
" In other "ords, when you like it... "
"No, when I like it and when I d on 't like it."
"Ev en when you don't like it?"
"Of course, it can be a feeling, some thing more profound. I'm sayi ng it because I feel it, no? I've felt it
and I've experienced it . . ."
''Then, r eally. you have the power, every time you make love . . ."
"... it can become like something sublime and beautiful, because it's also a sa crifice that you're making,
and that sacrifice can inspire you too, evel)1hing can inspi re you, a s ac rifice, an emotion, a moment of hap­
piness, everything, whether you like it or not."
"Does that happen to you often?"
"No, not al wa ys , it's something very special. "
" But do y ou try to make it happen?"
"Np, I d on't try, it j ust comes alive inside me, and it happens."
"But you could make it happen by trying too . . ."

"Ah. no, the th ing is that by tr ying, all of us, every human being, have the capacity to do whatever we
"ant to be, no? What happens is that we don't set out to, because eve!)' human being, we all have the men­
tal, spiritual and moral capacity to do it if we war:t, for example if you set out to be a great artist, a great
actor, or a writer, if you dec ide to do it you arc certain to do it, because if you feel that mental c apacity, you
do it... pain and suffering ar e the most beautiful experience a human being w ant s , and there's a high price
to pay for experience, isn' t there? Then the person who hasn't su ffered or felt pain, I d on't think he has the
same inspiration as someone who has su ffered . . .
"
...so yes, life is poetry, what each of us f eels."

q.53
A Glass of Milk The cow
is the continent
whose milk
(blood)
is being
spilled.

q.54
 Bogota, September 26, 1979

\.Vhat are we doing

to our lives?

q.55
Participation

Sex is dust,

el polvo,

the si

in passion.

q.56
 West Side Highway, 1 ew York, 1981

And to parti si pale

is

to partake of

suffering

(Passion from the Latin pat·ire, to suffer)

q.57
 Chile, 1981

Weaving together the two sides of the road.

q.58
 Antivero, Chile, 1981

Joining the two banks, below and above the water.

q.59
Tunquen

The meeting of sun and bone

is a path the hand knows how to follow

q.60
 Dust of orgasmic joy

- _,
-- yr

_
_ ,,
/
__

-
..

I laughed, knowing what was firs t

q.61
Death and Resurrection

trail of bones these sticks are

each in search of Lhe disappeared body

q.62
....---

Chile, 1981

q.63
Antivero

Stringin the air

the thread is a path 1 lose myself on

the path is a scent I go d own

q.6-l
"In those days everything was alive, even the stones" (Q'eros Myth)

Chilc,l981

The glabrous nipa leaves, with veiny undersides,

are the spirit, the guardian.

Thigh and lava, dry sun and scented space,

the earth as king for love.

Before it is polluted, the river wants to be heard:

q.65
 Sendero Chibcha

�
I
I
I
I·

se
birds lo
w ea ve lines,
ibchas
The Ch
 Bogota, 1981

q.67
 The earth breathes through its cracks

Sidewalk Forests,

Greenwich Street, New York, 1981

Four Directions,

Block Island, 1983

q.68
K'ijllu

Block Island, 1983 1\'laine, 1985

"K'ijllu is the Quechua word for the cracks in rocks, not in ordinary rocks but in cnor
­

mous,oncs, or the endless scams that run through the mountain range."
-Jose 1\larfa Arguedas

I filled the crack with red dust. The remains of a people who buried
their dead with red ocher powder were later uncovered nearby.

The rock remembered, the K'ijlJu crack.

q.69
Lucy's Mica, 1984
 1982
Plumed Roclt,
Knot and Stich, 1982

q./1
 I

l
-I
Bone, 1982

Treno,1984

Little Lace, 1982

Tree of Life, I 984

q.74
 Cemetery, 1982

Bc•lcmcfn, 1984

Teeter-totter, 1984

j
I
I
'

--- -\
(
-
'

Guardian, 1982

Three Crosses, 1982

q.75
 The Mum my,s Shirt, 1987

q.76
River Weeping, £1 Espinalillo, Chile, 1989

q.77
 .....

Pueblo de Altares, Exit Art, New York, 1990

favelas, callampas, pueblos j6venes, villas misel"ias, shantytow1is

all are pueblos de altares

I
 I

Litter Music, Exit Art, New York, 1990

The Hudson River

Changing signs, mine and those there by chance. The boats and the trash, mingling.

q.84
A Galaxy of Litter, ew York, 1989

q.85
 Fire Hydrant, Hubert Street, ew York, 1989

q.86
Raft on Beach Street, 1989 Quipu in the Gutter, Hudson StreeL, New York, 1989

<J.R7
Resurrection of the Grasses, Exit Art, New York, 1990
 The Origin of Weaving

. ; f the stars
i1JPI�...,�'loloriri: the coming out

l
weave from weban, cross thread

the coming out

of the cross-star

the interlacing of
warp and weft

To imagine the first cross

intertwining of branches and twigs
to make a nest
to give birth

the first spinning of a thre

to cross spiraling f

the first thread coming o fleece trapped in

vegetation

the first cross of warp and w �t

union of high and low, sky and earth,
I
woman and man

the first knot, beginning of the spiral:

1
life and death, birth and rebirth
 I i)\
C
>',
I '�
:t '
(;f �
v t�

I)
I t \: r
" '.( ""-..,
I

AT P�� 1 r
(
}
I

. �( .
I�

I'

(
�.,
( �Vr�i
'r\� ·I"
I
I I

t
ss
��
t
(I
t ( 0""' ·,
� oi·
"��
'I\!
\' ',
. �1
•
II cr ·
·.
(C
'1\ Je.�J �� r� ,, �

� �s Ht
�c.,

,
'r,(t
ft
•
 ro� lY' 'I)

(U i (.<it I
X<> p 4.. "Y\
II

\o(;!.. (._0 ""' t. a

(>Oiot- T

""""�'"" ':)1'"0\.$
.v
f'\-e"'t

\W\ \"' '\ \... � ro�""'·

)

\- \.:,E. <...o
r\�"'
�

t''-''{..

\"""'ne.. f-\lo�...-s
'Yv'l. e s

r· c i '\'\ \- � J . . . ,)
 Quipu, 1991

q.92
Improvisations, 1991

q.93
 Poncho of Five Squares, I 992

q.94
Poncho of r:ive SLrancls, 19Y2

q.95
 ·.

. '

. .
.

... . .

.'
:

.·

. .:.-..""' - " ..... -

·'
'·

'
I
'
I.
I
'
•I
.
'
•

\ ..

\ .

(
0"'

•
 !

. .

'
�..�4·._.,· .. �
. .. . . .

0
' .
·.

Constellation, University Art 1\luscum, Berkeley, 1994

·.
El Ande Futuro

"The time has come to renew the past."

"The future is behind: it has not yet arrived."

they say in the Andes

"The spindle is the axis of the world and to weave is to think."

"Thoughts are threads and the strand we spin is our thought"

"A strand well spun is a life ..veil lived."

the Kogi says

q.98 University Art 1\luseum, Berkele), 1992

q.JOO
Shrouded stone

M eta l thread

Silver helix

Tethered clay

Empty poncho

New York, 1993

q. /0/
Street Weavings

Hudson Street, New York, 1993

q. I02
Beach Street, ew York, 1993

q.l03
 Bcguinagc of Saint-Elizabeth, Kortrijk, 1994

"Beneath the aphonic thicket

The captive cities slowly pass
stitched one to another by telephonic threads"

- Vicente Huidobro

q./0-1
Cerro Santa Lucfa, Santiago, 1994 Collister Street, New York, 1994

�o stop the world is to set it in motion.

The streets don't move at the same speed J do.

"Are you personally closing the street?"

a man asked me,

"just for a while," I said

tirando lineas in Collister Street.

q. 105
Allqa

Lace is a shatter

a rip in the air

there is no

beginningofthend

all is

s
p

in this ins

tant

ing

in this uncertain middle

I am

q.l06
Bcguinagc, l<ortrijk, 1994

q./0/
 Beguinage, Korlrijk, J 994

q.I08
 Sewn Wall,
Beguinage, Kortrijk, 1994

White I lair on White Street, New York, 1994 q.I09

Ceq'e

Thread Suns

"there are

still songs to be sung on the other side

of mankind"

-Paul Celan

The ceq'e is not a line, it is an instant, a gaze,

to me
asure a nd m
ediate is not
a quipu tha t

tin1 e s
, ritual
mea sure

q.IIO
q.I/1
Pencils, Franklin Street, New York, 1994

A door in the asphalt.

q.112
 Constellation in Greenwich Street, 1994

Writing is the door to the underworld.

q.113
The Corral Grid, San Fernando, Chile, 1994
 Cruz del Sur

s e

s h
t

s s
0
ll
t
h

A constellation o f darkness
another of light

A gesture to be completed
by light

"The flickering lights . . . produce the trance ... and a gleam in the dark is seminal."

q.l18
The Southern Cross, an Fernando, 1994

q.J 19
q.l20
 I
I
j
I
I

\
I
I
I
I

\
i
)
I

\\

Hilumbres Allqa I The Thread Catching Light, Beguinage, Kortrijk, 1994

q.l21
Allqa

Weaving soft ladders

Weaving contrasts

Weaving senses,

q.J 22
the degrees of emotion are transformed

black and white fall in love

the shatter is reattached and hate becomes love

Weaving contraries is the bridge, the bridge of mist

(

q.123
 "... mist into flesh ... "

- Henri Michaux

Hilo de agua, hilo de vida, hilo de voz

:,l;.rossi ng precarigusly
between two _yvorlds"

g./24
q.J25
 "Even as airy threads come from a spider,
so from Atman, the spirit in man,
come all powers of life. "

"This is the spirit never born,

the consciousness of life . . .
the bridge that keeps the worlds apart."

- Brihad Upanishad

q. 126
 Q)
<.)
........
0
> --.

t..j....j Q)
-.
0 '---'

consciousness IS Q) con and scire: to join o.o and to cut.

c::
1:: �
0 1-o
� .......

k rJJ
0
,.I:.
ff
0
<.) k
. .......
......
""'
�
0.. 1::
continuum is con tinere, to hold with and to stretch.
�

""0 .......
""'
...c::
0 o.o
<.) ......
.......

""0
1:: �
::::l �
'l)
0 \-..
Vl .....,
V)
o.o Vl
.......
1::
attention is tendere, ........
k thin, tenuis, to stretch b.Q toward
� c:
Vl .......
$..;
� .......
V) Vl
0
�
0
.....,

Vl

Q)
c
0
.......

q.J27
"One that is the same at the time of creation
and at the time of dissolution."

- Svetsvatara Upanishad

"my story and I vanish together like this"

- T ao
' Ch'ien

q.J28
q.l29
Documents
Entering

I thought that all this was perhaps nothing more than a way of
remembering

T<?_ remenwer (recordar) in. the-sense of playing the strings

(cuerdas) of emoti_on

Re-member, re-cordar, from cor, coraz6n, heart.

First there was listening with the fingers, a sensory memory:

the shared
bones, sticks and feathers were sacred things I had to arrange.

To follow their wishes was to rediscover a way of thinking: the

paths of mind I traveled, listening to matter, took me to
an ancient silence waiting to be heard.

To think is to follow the mu sic, the sensations of the elements.

And so began a communion with the sky and the sea, the need
to respond to their desires with works that were prayers.

Pleasure is prayer.

If, at the beginning of time, poetry was an act of communion, a

form of c�llectively entering a vision, now it is a space one enters,
a spatial metaphor

Medphor stakes out a space of its own creation.

If the poem is temporal, an oral temple, form is a spatial temple.

q. 131
Metapherein: to carry beyond
to the other contemplation:
to con-temple the interior and the exterior.

Space and time, two forms of motion that cross for a moment,
an instant
of doubled pleasure, concentration, con-
penetration.

The precarious is that which is obtained through prayer.

To pray is to feel.

"The guipu that remembers nothing," an empty string, 'vvas

my first precarious work.

1 prayed by making a quipu, offering the desire to remember.

Desire is the offering, the body is no.thing but a metaphor.

In ancient Peru, the diviner would trace lines of dust in the earth, as a
means of divination, or of letting the divine speak through him.

Lempad, in Bah, says: "All art is transient, even stone wears away."
"God tastes the essence of the offerings, and the people eat the material
remams. "
.

To recover memory is to recover unity:

To be one with sea and sky

To feel the earth as one's own skin
Is the only ldnd of relationship
That brings her joy.

New York, 1983-1991

q.l32
The Weaving of Words
"A number of meta phoric al expressions would appear to be creations
of ancient, even Indo-European date .. . It is po ss ib le to recons tr u ct
a poetic phrase of two members such as ... 'the weaver of words',
the Indo-European poet h imsel f, web.vom t.eh.s."
- Calvert \.Vatkins

t.elts, to weave, to fabricate, to make wicker or wattle for mud-covered walls

text, textile, context.

spin, to draw out and twist into thread, from spen, pen, Latin pendere,
to hang, weight, pensare, to think.

sutra, sacred Buddhist text, thread (Sanskrit)

tantta: sacred text derived from the Vedas: thread

ching, as in Tao Te Ching or I Ching, sacred book: warp

wei, its commentaries: weft

Quechua, the sacred language, derived from q'eswa, rope or cord made
of straw

wat�masimi, interwoven language, the creative language of the riddles and

the oracle, (Quechua).

In the Popol Vuh, the sacred book of the Quiche Maya, one of the names of
God is "Force Entwined".

" pirit spat out eighty threads of cotton: these distributed between the upper teeth which
acted as the teeth of a weaver's reed. In this way he made the un even threads of a warp. He
did the same with the lower teeth to make the even threads. By opening and shutting his jaws,
the pirit caused the threadsof the warp to make the movements required in weaving ... he
imparted his Word by means of a tec hnical process so that all men could u nd erstan d.
"The words that the Spirit uttered ... were woven in the threads ... they were the cloth, and
th e cloth was the Word.
"Thatris why woven material is called SO)', which means '!Lis spoken word.'

-Ogotemmli, "Conversations with Ogotemmli", Marcel Griaule

I ew York, 1990-96

q.J33
Connection

The art of joining, union

from ned: to bind, to tie
zero grade form: nod
Old English: net
Latin: nodus
knot

David Brower said: "The earth is dying because people don't see the
connections" (between a hamburger and the death of the rain forest ,
air conditioning and the death of the atmosphere.)

Eliot vVeinberger said: "Do you know what a clue is? A ball of yarn or
the thread that Theseus used to come out of the labyrinth, thus any­
thing that guides or directs in the solution of a problem."

"
Rene Guenon says: "the c onnection protects.

In Nahuatl one of the names of God is "nearness and togetherness."

A nolebook for Exit Art

lew York, 1990

q./34
The No

The first precarious works were not documented, they existed only for the
memories of a few citizens.

History, as a fabric of inclusion and exclusion, did not embrace them.

(The history of the north excludes that of the south, and the history of the
south excludes itself, enibracing only the north's reflections.)

In the void between the two, the precarious and its non-documentation estab­
lished their non-place as another reality.

New York, I989

The Non-Manifesto of the No Tribe

The non-movement of Charlie Parker, that's what we are in the warm, gener­
ous night of the South.
As life goes on in our solitary yet united experiences, nothing worries us.

\Ne manifest no desire or characteristic, we don't compose a manifesto so <IS

not to be categorized, and we're not afraid of categorizing ourselves, that
would be as difficult as waking up tomorrow as the most daring troop of para­
chutists in Polynesia.

We disturb order "vith our exasperating immobility.

\Ne undermine reality from within, that's why we arc subversive and kind.
And we're so sm�Jil and unknown that freedom is our delirium.
The tribe's campaigns are not highly secret and their only visible results for
those who non-live the non-movement are our stupid works.

\'Ve hope to transform solitude into the world's new idol.

\Ve don't say anything. After being talked about for centuries, It remains
unknowable.
Our macabre intention is to leave humanity naked, without preconceived
ideas, without the clothing that binds.
Don't be afraid. Years \>Ifill go by before our works appear. We aren't playing,
the inside of a seed is soft.
It can only be known by living It. Whatever It is.
It remains to be discovered.

Santiago de Chile, 1967

q./35
Arte Precario

\/\Then I said arle precario an energy was born.

The two words transformed each other.

Doing (ars) became prayer (precis), and prayer, doing.

The precarious was transformation,

prayer is change,

"the dangerous instant o f transmutation."

To name a work for its dissolution responds to an ancient vision:

the path of the planets, the sun and the moon,

is named for their disappearance,

eclip tic.

Kwakuitl string figures receive names from their patterns of dissolution

in the hand.

In the Andes, leftovers are collected in order t o throw out evil.

The knots are changes

and exchange generates the cure.

Continuity in obliteration.
In death, resurrection.

Debris, a past to come: what we say about ourselves.

An object is not an object, it is the witness to a relationship.

q. 136
A thread is not a thread, but a thousand tiny fiber-s entwined.

The word, unravelling in the air, begins again.

The warp is the arm

and the weft is the world.

The city is the book

and our gestures in it, the writing.

If art is the form of perception,

a way of seeing and he aring,

perhaps consciousness,
to join and to cut,
the double movement of the
weaver

is the art,
el con de la continuidad,
the togetherness of union, allqa.

"He himself must be the place in which he acts."

- J\11 . Eckhart

'We are waiting for a new sun to rise above the

horizon of egotism and sordidness in every sense."
- D.T. Suzuki

"Humanity begin s tomorrow."

- Macedonio Fernandez

New York, 1996

q.137
Notes

Con-c6n: Water-water (M.apuche), the meeting point of the Aconcagua Hiver and the Pacific Ocean
in Central Chile.

The glass of m.ilh, I ,920 children had died &om drinking contaminated milk.
A group of distributors were adding water and pigment to milk to sell more.
At that time, Chile's C.A.O.A. (a collective of poets and artists) invited me to participate in a work
called "To Keep From Starving to Death in Art" which would take place simultaneously in Santiago,
Toronto and Bogota.
I put up posters across the city announcing the spilling of a glass of milk under the blue sky.
Bogota is an overcast city. That day the sky was blue, the people gathered, the milk was spilled and
the poem written on the pavement.

Polvo: Dust. In popular use, polvo means fuck, reflecting an ancient association between death and
lovemaking .

El Espi.nalillo: A Chilean River I call Kentikh Phunt, the hummingbird's feather. In this territory I
set up the threads wondering, would they accept the work? In a few minutes they came down, flying
through the vertical lace.

Beguinage: a monastic community of lay women devoted to begging, contemplation, writing and
helping the poor. Heretics, they did not accept the authority of the Catholic Church. Founded in
Flanders .in the XII century, they continue to exist and produce lace work.
In 1994, th e Kanaal Art Foundation invited a few women artists to do individual site-specific instal­
lations at the Beguinage of Kortrijk. My installation occupied three lloors of the assembly building,
and wove the streets and gardens around it creating a palimpsest with the ancient Flemish lace.

Cen·o Santa Lucia: small ridge at the center of the valley where the colonial city of Santiago de
Chile was founded by the Spaniards in 1541. The Mapuche used to call it H-uelen, pain.

Ceq'e: Line (Quechua). The Inca's astronomical and ritual calendar. The ceq'e were a virtual qt�ipu
9f sight lines radiating out from Cuzco, invisible lines whose "knots" were the walt'a, sacred sites,
.
stones and temples used as markers for astronomical observation.

Th.e Southern Cmss: A Constellation that points to the South Pole as it moves across the sky. It con­
tains the most striking pair of opposites in the southern sky, "the jewel box"( shining brightly} and
"the coal sack," a dark patch in the Milky \ll.lay . Quechua astronomy saw the dark spaces between
the stars as "dark constellations."

La palabra es el hila, the word is the thread.

q.l38
Dimensions of the Works (in inches):

Con·c6n, Chile, 1967, 26 x9xl" (pp.l4-J 5).

Las Basw·itas de Con-c6n, 1968, 52x24x18"/l9xl0x3" (pp.2 0),
28x20xl4"/l6x8x3"/lOx9x7" (pp.21).
A Diary of Objects, 1973, sizes ranging from 4x8x2" to 2x5x2" (pp.35).
Aguja e Hilo, 1973, 3x7x2" (pp. 37).
Grid Objects, 1973, sizes in the range of 1x7x2" (pp.38-39).
Cigm·ette Wrappings, 1973, 3x3xl", (pp.40).
Weft of Incense Sticlts, 1973, 3x4xl/2" (pp.4l).
Black Book, 1973, 6x5" (pp.42-43).
Red Cloth, 1973, 10x5xl/2" (pp.45).
Ho·m.age to Vietnam, 1975, detail, 22x22" (pp.49).
L-u.cy's Mica, 1984, 3x7xl" (pp.70).
Knot and Sticlt, 1982, 6x3x4" (pp.71).
Phtmed Roclt, 1982, 6x5xl/2" (pp.71).
\-vhite Objects on Blaclt Asphalt., 1981 82 , 24x9x8'/6x5xl"/14xl8x7" (pp.72).
-

\Mhite Objects on BlackAs1?halt, 1981-82, aprox. range 14x3xl/2" (pp.73).

Treno, 1984, l0x7x2" (pp.7 4).
Bone, 1982, 14x4x4" (pp .74).
Ii·ee of Life, 1984, 7x5xl" (pp. 74).
Little Lace, 1982, 8xlxl" (pp.7 4 ).
Balancfn, 1984, 4x6x I" (pp . 75).
Cemetry, 1982, 9x8x7" (pp.75).
Teeter-totter, 1984, l Oxl2x6" (pp.75).
Guardian, 1982, 23xl3x6" (pp.75).
Three Crosses, 1982, l3x9x5" (pp. 75).
'l1te Mummy's Shiti, 1987, l8x9x5" (pp.76).
Pueblo de Altm·es, 1990, sizes ranging from 8x7x3" to l2x4x3" (pp.80-8l).
Litter Music, 1990, sizes in the aprox. range of l2x5x2" (pp 8 2-83).
.

Quipu, 1991, 12xi4xl/4" (pp.92).

Improvisations, I991, 9x8x2" (pp.93).
Poncho of Five Squares, I 992, 16x I 4x2" (pp.94).
Poncho of Five Strands, 1992, l7xl9x3" (pp.95).
Empty Poncho, I993, 8xl3x7" (pp. IOO).
Metal Thread, 1993, 7x5xl" (pp.IOO).
Tethered Clay, 1993, 4x4x3" (pp.IOO).
Silver Helix, 1993, 3xllx3" (pp.!Ol).
Shrouded Stone, 1993, 3x9x6" (pp.IOI).

g.l39
Translations Credits

All tr an slations in q'Uipoem. by Esther Al len.

with additional translations by:

-Eliot Weinberger (Glass of Milk, The H udson River). "Gias of Milk" and "!-Judson
River" copyright 1992 by CeciLia Vicuna. Reprinted fro m Um·avelli.ng Words & the
Weaving of \1\fater with the permission of Graywolf Press, Saint Paul, Minnesota.
-Anne Twitty (Interview in 11\!hat is Poetry to you?), reprinted from
Blasted Allegories, MIT Press, 1987.

Tao Ch'ien's quote by David I linton.

Brihad Upanishad by Juan Mascar6.

The poems Origin o f Weaving and Resurrection of the Grasses were written in English by
Cecilia Vicui'ia, and are reprinted from Unravelling Words and the Weaving of Water.

Kogi quotes from Reichel Dolmatoff (pp. 66, 67, 98, 118).

Photo Credits

Estela Arria: pp.

51.
Carlos Baeza: p p.31.
Nicholas Battye: pp. 35-45.
Ben Blackwell: pp . 96-99.
Catherine de Zegher: pp . 22, 104 - 105 , 107-109, 1 16- 1 25.
Peter Goodhew: pp. 52-53.
Larry Lame: pp.80-81, 82-83.
Oscar Monsalve: pp. 54-55, 66-67.
Cesar Paternosto: pp. 19, 23, 29, 49, 56-57, 59,64-65, 68-77, 84-95, 100-103, 105,
109-1 15, 129.
Cecilia Vicuna: pp. 20-21, 26-27.
JorgeVicuna:pp.ll-13, 18-19,24-25.
Ricardo Vicuna: pp. 14-15, 58, 60-61, 62- 63, 78-79.

Cover photo by Ricardo Vicuiia.

Seed drawings (pp.28-29) from: Chile: Plantas en Extinci6n, Carlos Munoz Pizarro,
Editorial Universitaria, 1971.

q.J40