Cecilia Vicuña

Cecilia Vicuña Poems

Cecilia Vicuña Biography

Cecilia Vicuña (born 1947) is a Chilean poet, artist, filmmaker and political activist whose work addresses topics such as ecological destruction, cultural homogenization, and economic disparity, particularly the way in which such phenomena disenfranchise the already powerless. She was born and raised in Santiago de Chile, and has been in exile since the early 1970s when the murder of elected president Salvador Allende by General Pinochet found her in London. She performs and exhibits her work internationally; museums that have exhibited her work include the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes de Santiago, the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA), Art in General, NYC, the Whitechapel Art Gallery in London, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and MoMA, the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Vicuña has authored and published sixteen books, most of which have been translated into several languages. These include The Precarious/Precario (1983), Cloud Net (2000), and Spit Temple (2010), a collection of her oral performances. In 2009, she also co-edited the Oxford Book of Latin American Poetry with Ernesto Livon Grosman, an anthology of 500 years of Latin American Poetry, which the Washington Post called "magisterial". Vicuna creates "precarious works," characteristic of Vicuña's work is her use of materials that are often fragile, worn by the elements and/or biodegradable back into the environment. She describes her work as a way of "hearing an ancient silence waiting to be heard." Since 1966, she began creating sculptural interventions called precarios, combining ritual and assemblage and typically throw-away materials such as yarn, sticks, feathers, leaves, stones and bones. Linked to the sacred wild Andean vicuña animal by name, Cecilia Vicuña utilized the wool of these animals for her Cloud-Net installation series as a metaphoric tool. The visual language of this series resulted in large-scale warp and weft installations within rural and urban environments—weavings—thus linking Vicuña to the Feminist Art Movement's Pattern and Decoration Movement.)

The Best Poem Of Cecilia Vicuña

Teresa The Idiot

In reality my loves
are the strange box of a Polish doll
The blonde's eyes appearing
fixed to her hips long after midnight
the garret always singular to loosen
a massive mane
across her back, its strands
thick and fine draping
her otter-like chin
Deliberately she'd peer out from the wall
and nothing could be seen but the shadow of  her breasts
hidden beneath marmots of  hair
And lovely was her skin's radiance
at that unusual hour
Her waist's digressions
easily discerned
as bees through grass
the window neither open nor closed
What I saw, yellow like crystal,
rose from sleepy thighs
amassed in unseemly tourniquets
Everything before me, a pale shimmer
of  hairs fanning delicately
to reveal the pink or green skin I no longer know
of  hips a million centimeters
from my gaze.

Cecilia Vicuña Comments