‘The Western mind is not just Europe and the US, also operates in the colonies, and I consider Chile, even today, a colonised country where everybody is subjected to a colonisation of the mind, spirit and soul. ‘All knowledge that disagrees with the Western system is eliminated, sometimes brutally, like in the current extermination of Indigenous people around the world’, she explains as a thread of incense billows through the air between us. This, she notes, is not just a story about how the Global North has excluded the South, but how the South has excluded itself by only embracing a Northern mentality. When we meet at her studio, in the Tribeca district of New York, she explains that this alienation has its roots in the West’s ‘mastery’ in denying all that matters to people, the Earth and the future. What she says, however, warrants undivided attention, an advantage she and her work have long been denied.įor most of Vicuña’s prolific 50-year career as an artist, poet, filmmaker and activist, she has been ignored, censored, marginalised, and ridiculed. Vicuña has the sort of speaking voice that doesn’t demand attention. But you might not know all that Vicuña’s work stands for, or all it took to get here. You might have been staggered by its scale, its command of materials, or its ability to envelop space and all who encounter it. You might have seen the work of Chilean artist Cecilia Vicuña before.
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