Cecilia Vicuña is a poet, artist, filmmaker and activist. Her work addresses pressing concerns of the modern world, including ecological destruction, human rights, and cultural homogenization. Born and raised in Santiago de Chile, she has been in exile since the early 1970s, after the military coup against elected president Salvador Allende. Vicuña began creating “precarious works” and quipus in the mid 1960s in Chile, as a way of “hearing an ancient silence waiting to be heard.” Her multi-dimensional works begin as a poem, an image that morphs into a film, a song, a sculpture, or a collective performance. These ephemeral, site-specific installations in nature, streets, and museums combine ritual and assemblage. She calls this impermanent, participatory work “lo precario” (the precarious): transformative acts that bridge the gap between art and life, the ancestral and the avant-garde.

Kuntur Ko [excerpts], 2012
Kuntur Ko is a collection of poems by poet and visual artist Cecilia Vicuña made for the spirit of water and composed in response to the destruction of the glaciers in Chile. Kuntur is the ancestral spirit, the guardian of the glaciers, weaving the waters as they move from glacier to ocean and back again.

Cecilia Vicuña contributed with this audio work within the
( ) – space.