BALTIC+

Cecilia Vicuna: Read Thread. The Story of the Red Thread

Cecilia Vicuna: Read Thread. The Story of the Red Thread
Library Shelf Location 18.VICU
Publication Date 2017
Description

From the 1970s to the present, Cecilia Vicuna's work has both visually and poetically engaged with rituals from Aboriginal Australia, South Africa, Paleolithic Europe, and pre-Columbian America that involve red-colored thread. The Chilean artist's performances, site-specific installations, paintings, and drawings relate to the symbolic function of textile and language as well as the ritual dimension of menstrual blood in the construction of solidarity through femininity and maternity, to support and continue life. Appearing on the occasion of Vicuna's installation in Athens for documenta 14, Read Thread tells the story of the sanguine thread in Vicuna's work. A tension arises in the asymmetry of Andean weaving and the artist's quipus large-scale immersive installations of thread, wool, and yarn that reference the pre-Columbian language of knotting, a type of weaving-as-writing. Vicuna's translation of the quipu into a spatial and performative poetics conveys the tension of ecological disaster and reparation as well as a bodily sense of the cosmic scale of landscape, history, and time.

ISBN 9783956793226
Quantity 1
Pages 148p; 23.6 x 16.6 x 1.2 cm
Editor Michele Faguet
Format Paperback
Publisher Sternberg Press, Berlin
Related Artist Cecilia Vicuna
Category Artist (relating to a single artist/collaborative team)
Artist's Nationality Chilean
Language English

Other Artists

Other Recent Books