In September 1973, Cecilia Vicuña was living in London and studying at the Slade School of Fine Arts. As a supporter of Salvador Allende’s socialist government in her native Chile, she’d spent the past months making small talismanic precarious sculptures using a mixture of detritus gleaned from the London streets and precious tokens of the Unidad Popular. These objects would contribute, she said, “politically, magically, and aesthetically” to the resistance against the growing threat of a military coup.
In the aftermath of the fascist junta, Vicuña assembled her journals, poems, sculptures, and paintings into the artist’s book Saborami (1973), produced in a handmade edition of 250 copies by the Beau Geste Press. Defiantly anti-monumental, it is one of the great socialist artworks of the twentieth century.
But Vicuña’s activism while in London wasn’t confined to art alone. She co-founded Artists for Democracy, that organised fundraising exhibitions for Chile, and spoke at meetings, published essays in feminist magazines like Spare Rib and Red Rag. Her work was relentless.
The translations published here come from an anthology of antifascist poetry Vicuña assembled between 1974 and 1975. This brought together contributions from Latin American writers along with figures like Andrew Salkey of the Caribbean Artists Movement, and the imprisoned and anonymous authors of these two poems. The anthology was never published: Vicuña left England for Bogotá in 1975, and the plans fell through.
But the poems remained safe in her archive. We came across them a couple of years ago when we were working on the facsimile edition of Saborami (Book Works, 2024). At the launch events earlier this year, with Gaza always on our minds, we would often end by reading these poems into the space Cecilia had created through her talks and performances. They speak across the half-century to the ongoing struggle against injustice and incarceration everywhere.
It’s possible that the original Spanish texts of the poems have been published before, but we think that these are their first appearances in English. More than 40,000 people were imprisoned and tortured at the National Stadium in Santiago during the military dictatorship. A copihue is the national flower of Chile.
—Luke Roberts & Amy Tobin