Indigenous Traditions and Climate Activism: The Art of Cecilia Vicuña
This piece was originally commissioned by Shado Magazine, for their third issue on climate justice. Please visit their website and support their work.
“Dedicated to the young people of this planet, the Indigenous and urban leaders of the eco-fem-socialist revolution around the world.”
This opening line of Cecilia Vicuña’s most recent publication, ‘Slow Down Fast, A Toda Raja’ succinctly encompasses the indomitable activist spirit behind Vicuña’s vast body of work. From the 1960s to the present day, Vicuña’s art and poetry has explored urgent political concerns from environmental destruction to human rights, all whilst staying grounded in the art, textiles and language of her Andean heritage.
Cecilia Vicuña is a poet, artist and filmmaker, who was born in Santiago, Chile in 1948. Raised in an area where knowledge of Indigenous culture is not taught, Vicuña began to teach herself about ancient American culture, art and language in the early years of her life. This went on to become the foundation of an artistic career that has spanned over fifty years. Undoubtedly, Vicuña’s relationship with Indigenous histories is fundamental to her artistic and activist work, using ancient textile and language traditions to create work that explores political oppression and the climate crisis. Alongside her art practice she has started initiatives such as the website oysi.org, an educational network that is committed to preserving and sharing Indigenous oral culture. Vicuña’s work and activism are powerful in that they use the historical artefacts or traditions of Indigenous communities to raise awareness of what can be lost and destroyed in the brutal process of colonisation.. I had the opportunity to talk to Vicuña about connectivity and collaboration in her activism and her work, and how her Indigenous heritage informs this.
Laura Moseley: Firstly, I’d love to talk about how you taught yourself about your own Indigenous culture when you were younger, and what impact this had on your life.
Cecilia Vicuña: Indigenous culture was not taught in any way in Chile. It was not even thought of or even named, and nobody even wondered if they were Indigenous or not. In other words, the suppression was so deep, that people did not even know that the suppression existed. I think because my mother was an Indian, everything that she did and transmitted was Indigenous, even though she didn’t name it or know that it was Indigenous. We lived in the countryside until I was nine. That is what makes me the poet and the artist that you are reading. One of the key elements of my mother’s way of being is that she could leave me alone, so I was left alone with the creatures, the animals, the forest, the canals, no one was overseeing me, and I think that is what made me free, and it made me imagine. At the same time my house was full of books. So, I had two wildernesses to follow, the wilderness of books and the wilderness of living things.
Even though there was no mention or acknowledgement of Indigenous heritage or history in the education system, we had comics! The comics were mainly produced in Mexico in the 1950s, because Mexico had had the Mexican revolution so there was a huge awareness of Indigenous cultures there. So along with ‘Superman’ and ‘Wonder Woman’, we received comics with stories of Indigenous peoples and myths and legends of the Americas. Nobody that I know of has ever written about or studied the effect of these comics. Every week I would wait for the arrival of one of these comics!
LM: What do you think about the role of teaching Indigenous histories to young people of today?
CV: When I was six years old, I already had a little forest school, where kids would come and be part of this little seminar. We loved it so much; it was a different kind of non-education that released the knowings of Indigenous peoples. My position on this is that we are all Indigenous to humanity, to humankind, so this idea that some people are Indigenous, and some people are white, is totally preposterous! We know that race doesn’t exist, so on the one hand, I am very proud of being a mix, but I have focused on my Indigenous side just because it is more fun! It is more powerful! It is more freeing than anything I have got from the West.
LM: You’ve talked about how unity with those in need has translated into a creative process for you. How does this translate into your climate activism of today?
CV: Climate justice is really the most urgent thing that we have as humanity. This is the time when we have to become completely aware and participatory in the destiny of the whole. This is the core Indigenous idea: that we are all individuals who are unique and different from everybody else, and at the same time we are completely dependent on the whole. I have been creating or been part of collectives since I was a little girl, and this has become the most powerful and beautiful aspect of my practice, especially in the last few years. Now, people are ready; they are seeking participation in collective movements. Something switched maybe five to ten years ago. I think all the revolutions that are happening everywhere in the world; in Colombia, the Black Lives Matter movement, climate justice, gender liberation — they’re all conjoining. So now, truly, there is a chance.
One of Vicuña’s most well-known works that explicitly explores the connection between Indigenous traditions and the environment are her ‘precarios’. These are small, temporary assemblies of everyday materials or found debris, bound together with string, placed in the ground, and left to the elements. First realised in 1966 at an ancient ritual point named ‘Con cón’ (‘water, water’) by Indigenous Chileans, where the Aconcagua River and the Pacific Ocean meet, these recognise the worth in the lost or discarded, the displacement and erasure Indigenous people in day to day life.
LM: I would love to talk about your ‘precarios,’ which feel very relevant right now. I’ve always understood them as a metaphor for those in life with very little power; connected with the world around us, holding each other in balance — and then they eventually disappear, it’s so fragile and so beautiful. As you’ve been making them over such a long time and over so many political movements, how do you feel about them today?
CV: One of the first things I noticed with the arrival of COVID-19 is that you couldn’t touch anyone, you couldn’t go out and you couldn’t pick up debris. I have been walking around forests, beaches, streets, picking up little bits and pieces that have been damaged, destroyed and abused. For me, since the beginning, in the 1960s, when I began picking up the materials, they’re not materials, they’re not objects, they are the being of the plant if the source was a tree. It is their being that is still present, that remains in this debris. Even if it is plastic, even if it is iron, whatever it is, it has a being inside it. Everything is energy and everything is transformation. In truth, if you can feel the pain and the suffering of a little stick, you are certainly doing what you just said, you are feeling their being as you feel other people and as you feel your own being. These little pieces of debris are people to you, they are saying something, they are teaching something, and it is up to us to listen. Listening is the key for the climate justice movement. For every possible transformation, listening with not just the ears, listening to what we want to hear but we have been suppressing. Just as we suppress Indigenous knowledge, we are suppressing this inside ourselves.
LM: Whilst we’re talking about listening, perhaps you could talk a bit about the role of the voice when you create art in or about the environment?
CV: Listening is the connector. There are these beautiful new forms of scientific research that are revealing how, for example, plants who have no ear, listen to the environment, and they have twenty times more sensitivity and ways of reading the environment than we do. Eventually this will be discovered in every living thing, the ways of listening are so wide. For me, since I grew up in silence without TV, without radio, I grew up listening to all different vibrations, which is what I’m keen on hearing. Not only what is inside of me, but what is inside of others. I believe it is the hearing and the listening that will get us through to another dimension of being.
LM: And perhaps for our last question, we could move to talk about the tactile senses in your work. I’d love to talk about your use of textile materials such as wool and string that appear a lot in your work, and how these connect your work to the environment?
CV: Since the string revolution began, which was thousands and thousands of years ago, when women first realised that you could spin fibre to make string, that immediately became a metaphor for the umbilical cord, and then it became a metaphor for the thread of water, because water runs in threads. So that is the meaning that I assign to wool, it is not because it is a domestic material, or because it’s about women’s labour — that is true, but it is not the key factor. The key factor is that the metaphor for connectivity is water, it makes this cosmos, this universe of which we are part of, work. So therefore, when you work with wool or string, you are bringing forth the sense of connectedness.
Vicuña has been creating work related to the environment, feminism and Indigenous history for decades, keeping connectivity, collaboration and ultimately, compassion, at the core of her practice. But her work has been largely ignored by the Western art world until recently. Despite creating relevant work that ran parallel (and sometimes even before) popular art movements such as land art, conceptual art, feminist art and minimalism, Vicuña’s work has not been awarded the same attention as the artists that dominate narratives on these movements. Perhaps this is because to categorise Vicuña’s work as any of these would be an oversimplification, as her five decades of work, like threads of water, run fluidly through all of these. With political movements and climate activism gaining more and more strength in the last few years, and major arts institutions finally collecting and displaying Vicuña’s work, the beauty, power and brilliance of Cecilia Vicuña is more compelling than ever.
