Inside the Cover Story: Cecilia Vicuña Weaves the Thread of the Earth across Time

To enter Cecilia Vicuña’s world is to step into a reverberating thread between breath and cosmos, mourning and joy, silence and song. For over five decades, her practice has unfolded like a quipu—knotted with ancestral memory, exile, ecological urgency, and the untranslatable languages of the Earth. Working across drawing, poetry, installation, and ritual, Vicuña has never separated the poetic from the political, the intimate from the cosmic. Hers is a life devoted to listening—listening to rivers, to disappearance, to past and future ancestors.

In June 2025, she was named the inaugural recipient of Art Basel’s Icon Artist Award—an honor that affirms the global resonance of her work and signals a shifting consciousness in the art world. The award recognized her as a weaver of worlds, a voice for the silenced, and a keeper of forms long dismissed or misunderstood. From her early precarios—ephemeral offerings of thread, stone, and feather—to the vast quipus that now hang like breathing constellations across museums, her practice remains faithful to what she calls “the thread of the Earth.”

Born in Santiago in 1948 and exiled after Chile’s military coup, she has long moved as a seer—creating fragilities that endure, breathing language into palabrarmas, and reawakening the quipu not as artifact, but as a living act of remembrance. Whether through her solo at the Guggenheim, her Golden Lion–winning presence at the Venice Biennale, her monumental Brain Forest Quipu in Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall, or her suspended threads at documenta 14, Vicuña’s art insists on the continuity between spirit, community, and land.

Now, in 2025, she prepares for “Reverse Migration, a Poetic Journey” at the Irish Museum of Modern Art—a return not only to place, but to the mythic roots of her ancestral intuition. This is not a retrospective, but a renewal: a gathering of threads across time, place, and perception.

In this rare conversation with Whitewall, Vicuña speaks about spirals of becoming, the agency of fear, the power of tenderness, and art as an offering for a world still learning to listen.

WHITEWALL: Your practice has always moved with a prophetic grace, interlacing land, language, memory, and spirit. At this juncture, following decades of radical experimentation and poetic resistance, how do you trace the arc from your early precarios to the quipus of today?

CECILIA VICUÑA: The arc, I believe, is really a spiral—because as you grow older, the ability to return to your earliest sensations and perceptions becomes stronger. Everyone who has been fortunate enough to grow old knows this. It becomes a kind of mine of visions, and you begin to understand, with clarity, how incredible it is to have been a child.

Just today, I was remembering my first exile—from the countryside where I lived until the age of nine, to the city. I began inventing exercises for myself so I wouldn’t lose the way of being I had known in the countryside. And where did that come from? A nine-year-old couldn’t have learned that from books—no one around me spoke of such things. So the only answer is that the girl already lived in a rich universe of imagination—precisely because I was often alone, or “alone” in quotation marks, but with animals, with trees, with the garden, with other little kids.

That experience gave me a view of human potential that I believe we’re now canceling out through the brutality of our culture’s protectionist, control-driven mode. So this spiral—what you called an arc—is now reinforcing whatever I felt as a child and allowing me to access it in an entirely new way.

The Transformative Art Basel Icon Artist Award

WW: Receiving Art Basel’s inaugural Icon Artist Award places you among those who have reshaped the language of contemporary art. How do you reflect on this recognition, especially as someone whose work has long stood apart from institutional power and visibility?

CV: When I arrived at the ceremony, I thought: if an award like this can be created—and given to someone like me—then a paradigm shift is already underway. The reasons outlined in the little document I received would never have justified such recognition in the past. That’s precisely where the shift lies.

Even if it doesn’t always appear so, there’s a transformation happening in people’s consciousness—in our awareness of how we must behave, how we must be human, how we must be with one another. Recognizing each other is the first step.

Returning to what I said earlier about the child: when you look closely at a very young baby—and I’ve been lucky, since I don’t have children, to have dear friends who do—I watch how a baby looks at their mother. You can see that the child is calando, as we say in Spanish. It means going through the mesh—reading the slightest change in emotion or feeling. The richness of that perception is immense.

If we could relate to each other that way, everything would change. Spite, anger—those things wouldn’t remain the same.

The award also revealed something powerful about Basel itself. Before the ceremony, several beautiful speeches gave context to the city—home to the oldest art museum in Europe and over 800 years of continuous support for the arts by a small, devoted community. That was profoundly moving.

The ceremony took place in a government salon—the very space where cantonal assemblies for Switzerland and Basel are held. It felt as if we were sitting in a place meant to deliberate on the present, the future, and the past. That was remarkable.

When I received the award, I was speechless. I looked up and saw a sign: “Salus Publica, Suprema Lex.” I thought, how extraordinary to be in a room where that is the guiding principle—where that kind of unity is being upheld.

I felt deeply honored to be in such a place. My father would have been so proud.

Cecilia Vicuña at the Irish Museum of Modern Art

WW: The title of your forthcoming exhibition at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, “Reverse Migration, a Poetic Journey,” suggests a movement against dominant tides—toward ancestral memory, ecological renewal, or spiritual return. What does this phrase evoke for you, and how does the exhibition extend your evolving cosmology?

CV: A few years ago, I wrote a text called Language is Migrant, reflecting on the word “migration”—its etymology, partly imagined, partly real. I saw “mi” as rooted in the self, the heart. To migrate, then, is to move the heart of the Earth. Our histories are made of these movements. Humanity has always migrated—from Africa to Europe, Siberia, South America. To resist migration is, in essence, to resist being.

In that spirit, my partner once gave me a surprise DNA test, through a now-defunct group called Oxford Ancestors. It traced our genes back 140,000 years and revealed that my paternal ancestors came from Northern Ireland. In a remarkable twist, my partner’s lineage came from the same clan—Oisín, named after the mythical Irish poet. We laughed and said, “We’re from the same tribe!” The resonance of that moment was profound. Our souls don’t care about time or space—they respond to connection.

“Our souls don’t care about time or space—they respond to connection,”

Cecilia Vicuña

In 2005 or 2006, we traveled to Ireland and spent a month visiting prehistoric sites, performing rituals, being with the land, the stars, the smells. I felt utterly at home. How could I feel that in a place I’d never been? That mystery stayed with me.

Now, nearly two decades later, I’ve been invited to exhibit at the Irish Museum of Modern Art. “Reverse Migration” is my homage to that return—a poetic homecoming to ancestral memory. Even if the science behind the journey is uncertain, the experience was real. And that, to me, is what matters.

As a teenager in Santiago, I remember reading Ulysses in Spanish and feeling utterly mesmerized. What could I have truly understood back then? I don’t know—but something resonated. That’s how I believe the soul travels: through language, through story—reaching across time, place, and distance.

Works of Mourning and Reawakening

WW: Your quipus—those vibrant, hanging constellations of thread, knot, and breath—have come to be understood as sites of both mourning and reawakening. What are your most recent quipus asking of us, and how do you attune yourself to what they wish to become?

CV: Your question recognizes that the quipu has its own agency. I’ve been working with the quipu since I was a teenager, and in recent years I’ve returned to it through a kind of archaeological research—guided by scholars, my early writings, and the memories of my pre-teen years, when I was already painting and writing intensely.

The quipu first appeared in my poetry. How could a knot enter a poem? Because the quipu holds a transformational force. The word itself means “knot,” and mathematicians describe the knot as the most complex object—an emblem of infinity, with endless permutations and transfigurations. How did ancient people come to encode knowledge through knots? This mystery opened a universe for me—knowledge not found in books, nor even in oral tradition, because the quipucamayocs—the breath-givers of the knot—were exterminated.

And yet, the quipu endured. Since the 1990s, researchers have found communities in the highlands of Peru still creating quipus. For years, I thought I was alone. Now I know I was not.

So, what do the quipus wish to become? I’ve come to see three dimensions: the quipu of the mind, which reveals our cosmic and communal entanglement; the ritual quipu, organizing people into collective action; and the object quipu, holding memory.

In this time of climate catastrophe and social collapse—when people are losing land, water, and ground—the quipu calling most urgently is the quipu of action. A few years ago, I created the Quipu of Encounters, a collective ritual that invites participants to become a living knot—bound by shared intention and care for each other and the Earth.

It’s been performed across countries and will soon return to Chile, where it began. I’m working in territories devastated by extractivism, where communities are rising to defend rivers and land. There, the quipu becomes a tool—a weapon of tenderness—for the sake of the future.

WW: You have long engaged with Indigenous knowledge systems, oral traditions, and ecological grief—well before these entered the institutional mainstream. Do you sense a deeper listening today, or are we still circling the surface of wisdom that your work has quietly offered for decades?

CV: I think we’re still circling the surface. That’s a very, very good way of putting it. I believe many young people—such as yourself—are sensing that. You wouldn’t ask such a question if you weren’t already feeling it. And that’s important, because only when young people begin early enough to feel that, to pursue it, and not let go of the question, can something begin to emerge—something that may hint at an answer.

Answers aren’t fully manifesting yet because we still need what is called masa crítica—critical mass. We need large numbers of young people engaging relentlessly, pursuing the right to illusion, you know? The desire to be in love with life—not with death or extinction.

I do see that happening. It’s like brotes—sprouts—emerging here and there. And yes, those sprouts are growing. But we need that to become an explosion of beauty—of love and creativity.

And that’s within us. Especially within the children. That’s why I focus so much on them. We’re witnessing a generation being lost to social media—to the screen. It’s severing the neural connections of babies and children. Those who manage to escape that influence—they’re going to be the key. They’ll be essential to their generation, to their friends, their communities.

Not enough people realize the screen is damaging the human brain. Neuroscientists are saying this, but are people really listening? Not quite. I constantly see babies—six months old—scrolling through screens, while their parents look on, unaware.

If we’re going to return to that wisdom within us, we must respond with strength. Everything is entangled. Everything is connected. And it will come—if we stay open.

“If we’re going to return to that wisdom within us, we must respond with strength,”

Cecilia Vicuña

There’s also another piece of research I find vital, now confirmed: the act of writing by hand—pen and paper—lights up millions of neural connections. The screen doesn’t do that. And people are losing the art of handwriting. I do all my work by hand. And you can feel the power of that connection. It’s ancient. It’s been with us for thousands of years. Our hands remember.

WW: You coined the term palabrarmas—word-weapons—as a way of naming language’s potential for awakening. What is the role of the poetic in your practice now, in this moment of planetary unraveling and cultural amnesia?

CV: It is what makes us human.

The word poetic, which we still use, was created a few thousand years ago in Greece—and it means “to make out of nothing.” Isn’t that exactly what we are? Making out of nothing. That is the image of creativity itself. We can’t help but be creative.

For me, the poetic means staying open to not-knowing—like a flower or a leaf opening to the light. That state allows poetry to exist. There are no limits. There is an internal fountain that flows from there.

“For me, the poetic means staying open to not-knowing—like a flower or a leaf opening to the light,”

Cecilia Vicuña

And who created this fountain? It was born from people interacting across time—making, creating, sharing. The fountain is eternal, as long as we are. Not eternal as in timeless, but as continuity—from person to person.

It’s a way to understand both continuity and disruption—the change you face when you try to create something that doesn’t yet exist. And that drive—to bring something new into being—is the most powerful force.

As long as we can feel that, there remains the possibility of what we call hope.

The Artist’s Creative Process

WW: You’ve spoken of fear not as something to overcome, but as a presence to inhabit with clarity and softness. How do fear, loss, and tenderness move through your creative process today?

CV:  Tenderness is a difficult one for people to allow themselves to feel. I think people in general—and I’m speaking globally—are afraid of tenderness. I’ve felt that many times. People feel exposed when they allow themselves to be tender.

And I believe that we cannot allow beauty to arise if we’re not tender. So tenderness is, again, a precondition for beauty to emerge.

Now, fear—when I was a little girl, the very first poem I ever wrote was about fear. So fear was my first teacher. And that has been a thread throughout my life. I still write about fear. I still think about fear.

And what I’ve learned is that fear is like a sphere. It’s not something you can conquer. You can’t win. There is no battle. There is only the presence of fear. And then you ask: How do I stand before this presence? You stand very still. And if you are still—and if you are breathing—the fear begins to speak.

And the fear tells you something you hadn’t noticed. Fear is extremely important for your understanding of reality.

“Fear is extremely important for your understanding of reality,”

Cecilia Vicuña

It’s not the negative thing people think it is. It’s not a defect in your character. It’s actually a richness. A gift.

And so I always say: Let’s try to be friends with fear.

WW: If, as you have often said, art is a ritual of healing and reconnection—an act of weaving the world back into wholeness—what kind of healing do you hope your work offers in this particular season of the world?

CV: That is a very complex question, because I never truly know what my work is doing. I’m always surprised when someone tells me what it did for them—because that is what matters, not what I think it’s doing.

What I can say is that, for me, making art—writing, creating anything—is my healing. I don’t know any other form of healing.

“Making art—writing, creating anything—is my healing,”

Cecilia Vicuña

So yes, it’s a healing for me. I’ve always done it in that spirit, and it continues to be that.

Sometimes I feel the pain of people in my community, in my family, or even people I meet on the street—and that pain enters me. It becomes a poem, or a drawing, or a quipu. That’s what I offer.

And sometimes it reaches someone else. And when it does, it’s extraordinary. That’s all you need—just one person who felt something resonate. Then you know that the weaving has taken place. That’s the moment that matters.

WW: Your practice speaks across time—to ancestral voices, to the trembling present, and to futures not yet imagined. How do you envision future generations engaging with your work—not as a legacy to preserve, but as a thread to follow, unweave, or reinvent?

CV: I believe the generations that are coming now are already born with a completely different spirit. In a way, they don’t need my work—they already know. That’s the feeling I get when I meet some young people. I see in their eyes that they are already carrying a different light.

If my work serves them, it would be only to help them understand that there is a continuity in that light. That they’re not alone. That there were others who also carried that light, who also trusted the invisible, who also loved the unnameable.

And that is such a precious thing—to feel accompanied on that path. Because otherwise, the path can feel so lonely.

So that’s my hope: that my work might be one of many little lights along the way.

“That’s my hope: that my work might be one of many little lights along the way,”

Cecilia Vicuña