Cecilia Vicuña

Quipu Womb (The Story of the Red Thread, Athens) 2017 is a monumental sculpture by Cecilia Vicuña composed from fifty-two red wool strands, referred to as chorros, that hang from a circular ring suspended from the ceiling. Each of the chorros is of a different length but many can reach up to twelve metres. The combined weight of the chorros is approximately 80 kg (176.37 lb). The hanging height can be adapted for the display space but, in each case, the chorros that touch the floor are left in a loose formation. The work was first exhibited at documenta 14 at the National Museum of Contemporary Art (EMST) in Athens in 2017.

‘Quipu’ is the Spanish transliteration of the word for ‘knot’ in the Cuzco Quechua language of Peru. The work draws upon the practice of quipu-making from the pre-Colombian period in Peru, when people would tie cords into knots, with additional coloured strands attached, as an alternative form of language to record events, information and stories. Vicuña has explained:

In the Andes people did not write, they wove meaning into textiles and knotted cords. Five thousand years ago they created the quipu (knot), a poem in space, a way to remember, involving the body and the cosmos at once. A tactile, spatial metaphor for the union of all. The quipu, and its virtual counterpart, the ceque system of sightlines connecting all communities in the Andes, were banished after the Conquest. Quipus were burnt, but the vision of interconnectivity, a poetic resistance endures underground. The ‘quipu that remembers nothing’, an empty cord was my first precario (c. l966). Today, I continue to create metaphorical iterations of the quipu. (Cecilia Vicuña, http://www.ceciliavicuna.com/quipus, accessed 20 October 2020.)

Vicuña’s use of this technique is a reclaiming of Indigenous practices that have been integral to her work as an artist and also as a poet. In her poem ‘Word & Thread’ Vicuña relates thread to language, writing: ‘A word carries another word as thread searches for thread.’ (‘Word & Thread’, in Witte de With 2019, translated from Spanish by Rosa Alcalá, p.332.) Through the assortment of chorros that overtake the height of the gallery space, Vicuña seems to suggest that Quipu Womb is an epic poem waiting to be told, while the visual effect of the cascading form has an affinity with water, also a recurring feature in both her writing and performances. The crimson colour of the sculpture more explicitly draws attention to the title of the work, which the curator Dieter Roelstraete has said references the ‘syncretic religious tradition that, via the umbilical cord of menstrual symbolism, connects Andean mother goddesses with the maritime mythologies of ancient Greece’ (Roelstraete 2017, accessed 20 October 2020).

Quipu Womb is the largest of approximately ten monumental Quipu sculptures the artist has created during her career. She began making them in 1966 and soon integrated them into her everyday life. A now lost quipu was included in the presentation of her installation Precarios: Journal of Objects for the Chilean Resistance 1973–4 (Tate T14170) at Arts Meeting Place in London in 1974. They can be connected to her broader interest in performance, language, textiles, ecology and activism. Vicuña often creates performances around the construction and display of her works and while this sculpture was on display in Athens, she used excess portions of wool in a performance titled Beach Ritual, staged along the city’s coastline.

Red thread has been a recurring element in the artist’s work since the 1970s, used metaphorically in ephemeral weavings placed in the landscape as well as in paintings and sculpture to refer to blood, menstruation and wounds, as well as to communal bonds. Examples of these works include Angel of Menstruation 1973 and the performance Glass of Milk Bogota 1973. In 2006, to protest against the ongoing ecological destruction of El Plomo Glacier in Chile, Vicuña staged Quipu Menstrual in front of the presidential palace. The motif of a red thread also appears in many of her poetic texts, published in Read Thread, The Story of the Red Thread (Sternberg Press, Berlin, 2017) and Cecilia Vicuña: About to Happen (Siglio Press, Catskill, New York, 2017).

Further reading
Dieter Roelstraete, documenta 14: Daybook, 2017, https://www.documenta14.de/en/artists/13557/cecilia-vicuna, accessed 20 October 2020.
Cecilia Vicuña, Read Thread: The Story of the Red Thread, Berlin 2017.
Miguel Lopez (ed.), Cecilia Vicuña: Seehearing, The Enlightened Failure, exhibition catalogue, Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam 2019.

Michael Wellen, Fiontán Moran
October 2020