Cecilia Vicuña’s Radical Fiber Art at Tate Modern Mourns Ecological Disaster
Portrait of Cecilia Vicuña with Brain Forest Quipu at Tate Modern, 2022. Photo © Tate Photography. Photo by Sonal Bakrania. Courtesy of the artist and Tate.
Cecilia Vicuña, installation view of Brain Forest Quipu at Tate Modern, 2022. Photo © Tate Photography. Photo by Matt Greenwood. Courtesy of the artist and Tate.
Mounted on the heels of Cecilia Vicuña’s Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the 2022 Venice Biennale and her retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum, the Chilean artist’s newest commission in Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall is her most ambitious work to date. Titled Brain Forest Quipu, the multimedia installation brings together different elements of Vicuña’s practice—from her sculptural quipu to her audio and digital works—to address environmental catastrophe and Indigenous rights.
Since the 1960s, Vicuña has drawn on quipu—the ancient Andean communication system based around knots—to create participatory performances and immersive installations. Made from alpaca or llama wool, the composition, color, and length of the knots offer as many combinations as an alphabet. Quipu were most famously used during the Incan empire to record numerical values such as taxes, inventories, and schedules; it is also estimated that a third of remaining quipu contain narrative information. These stories are lost to us as quipu and the knowledge of how to read them slowly disappeared following Spain’s colonization of South America.
Cecilia Vicuña, installation view of Brain Forest Quipu at Tate Modern, 2022. Photo © Tate Photography. Photo by Sonal Bakrania. Courtesy of the artist and Tate.
On view on opposite ends of the Turbine Hall through April 16, 2023, strands of ghostly white material cascade down from two metal rings installed 27 meters above ground. While these works appear monumental from a distance, up close, they reveal themselves to be made from humble materials: unspun wool, wire, rope, cardboard, threadbare cloth. One of the two soft sculptures includes found objects—driftwood, lamb bones, pieces of oyster shells, broken ceramics, and more—that appear caught in the unspun wool, the cosmic gas in which life is born, according to ancient Andean cultures. The pieces are entrancing with their complex materials referencing the microscopic and the universal, moving gently with the air currents in the Turbine Hall.
The delicacy and intricacy of Vicuña’s fiber sculptures could almost distract you from the political message they carry. Her work has always focused on social and environmental justice, which she often approaches through the lens of her identity as an Indigenous mestizo artist of Diaguita descent. The bone-white sculptures in Brain Forest Quipu represent the bleached bark of trees devastated by anthropogenic droughts and fires, while other smaller elements, such as snakeskin and bone, reflect the death of beings that lived in the forest. Vicuña transforms the Turbine Hall into a space of mourning.
Cecilia Vicuña, installation view of Brain Forest Quipu at Tate Modern, 2022. Photo © Tate Photography. Photo by Sonal Bakrania. Courtesy of the artist and Tate.
Cecilia Vicuña, installation view of Brain Forest Quipu at Tate Modern, 2022. Photo © Tate Photography. Photo by Sonal Bakrania. Courtesy of the artist and Tate.
Extending the concept of the quipu beyond sculptural forms and into the realm of sound, the digital, and the interpersonal, Brain Forest Quipu is Vicuña’s most radical reimagining of the communication system. The audio installation Sound Quipu is composed of insect noises, birdsong, rushing water, Indigenous music, and Vicuña’s own voice, while the video Digital Quipu provides essential political context to Vicuña’s sculptures. It brings together video interviews of Indigenous activists from Brazil, Colombia, Papua New Guinea, and India who are fighting against the destruction of their land caused by mining, water pollution, or intentional fires. Many speak of the threats and violence they’ve faced.
Vicuña describes the installation as “social weaving.” The exhibition materials are careful to emphasize the labor of everyone involved in the installation’s creation: a team of local artisans and members of London’s Latinx community fabricated the sculptural works, and local Latin American women collected from the banks of the River Thames the small, broken objects woven into one of Vicuña’s fiber sculptures. By entwining all these different elements together into Brain Forest Quipu, Vicuña highlights our connection with the natural world and each other.
Cecilia Vicuña, installation view of Brain Forest Quipu at Tate Modern, 2022. Photo © Tate Photography. Photo by Matt Greenwood. Courtesy of the artist and Tate.
Cecilia Vicuña, installation view of Brain Forest Quipu at Tate Modern, 2022. Photo © Tate Photography. Photo by Sonal Bakrania . Courtesy of the artist and Tate.
At Tate Modern, Vicuña bears witness to ongoing ecological destruction and calls for both awareness and action. Through participatory performances, she invites viewers to form a new community that might enact poetic and political change. Public programming—such as “Quipu of Encounters: Rituals and Assemblies,” taking place on October 14th— brings viewers, scientists, activists, and poets together in a collective ritual through a global series of events that the artist calls “knots of actions.”
Vicuña’s practice was overlooked by the mainstream art world for decades because, as she said in a 2019 interview with the New York Times, “no one was interested in climate change then.” Following continuous summers of record temperatures in the U.K. and across the globe, her work has never felt more urgent. As the loose and undone ends of Vicuña’s sculptural quipu suggest, there are still more knots to form and stories to tell.
