Cecilia Vicuña
Biography
Norma Cecilia Vicuña Ramírez was born in 1948 in Santiago de Chile to a family of artists. The great-granddaughter and granddaughter of sculptors and writers, Vicuña studied Arts at University of Chile and later moved to London after receiving a scholarship from the British Council to pursue her graduate studies at the Slade School of Fine Arts.
Poet, artist, filmmaker and activist, Vicuña is considered one of the pioneers of conceptual art in Chile. In 1967 she published her first poems in the Mexican magazine El corno emplumado, and that same year she founded Tribu No, a group of poets and artists who carried out collective art actions in Santiago.
Vicuña went into exiled in London after the military coup in Chile in the early 1970s, devoting herself to the political activism to protest the violation of human rights in Chile and in other countries. In the 1970s, she carried out a series of installations employing pre-Columbian indigenous symbols, elements of nature, and South American mythology.
Vicuña’s poetry, installations, painting, sculpture, films, performances and sound pieces weave together the precarious, the ephemeral, land, fertility and sacred ritual. For her, social change can happen if we treat awareness as a form of art and art as a form of transformation. Her work often approaches current challenges of the modern world such as environmental destruction, human rights, and cultural homogenization.
Some of her poetry books include Sabor a mí (1973), Precario/Precarious (1983), Unravelling Words & the Weaving of Water (1992), Cloud Net (2000), Instan (2001).
