Cecilia Vicuña

Galaxy of Litter, 1989
Cecilia Vicuña
C-print, signed and numbered edition of 50
9×14

Photo: Daniela Aravena

Cecilia Vicuña

Cecilia Vicuña is a poet, artist, filmmaker, and activist who lives and works in Chile and New York. Born and raised in Santiago de Chile, she has been in exile since the military coup in the early 1970s. Combining ritual and assemblage, she creates multidimensional, ephemeral, participatory, and site-specific works and performance installations which she calls “lo precario” (the precarious), a bridge between art and life, the ancestral and the avant-garde. In Chile she founded the legendary Tribu No in 1967, a group that created anonymous poetic actions. In 1974, exiled in London, she co-founded Artists for Democracy to oppose dictatorships in the Third World. Cecilia Vicuña is the author of twenty-two poetry books, including: About to Happen (Siglio, 2017); Read Thread, The Story of the Red Thread (Sternberg Press, 2017); New & Selected Poetry (Kelsey Press, 2018); and AMAzone Palabrarmas (Neubauer Collegium, University of Chicago, 2018).