SemiYa

Cecilia Vicuña made her first documentary while residing in Colombia after the 1973 coup d’état in Chile. Through this fundamental inquiry: ¿Qué es para usted la poesía? / What is poetry to you?, Vicuña unravels the role and substance of poetry in people’s lives. Speaking with school children, street performers, policemen, sex workers, fellow artists, and a scientist, the all embracing character of poetry emerges—its transformative role in personal relations, as a basis of oral history and the revolutionary imagination. – Chris Borkowski

In this documentary poem, Cecilia Vicuña returns to Con Con, the birthplace of her art in Chile, where the sea is dying and an ancient tradition is being destroyed.

A three-dimensional animation of a pre Columbian textile. The Paracas textile, 300-100 BC, was found in a tomb in the south coast desert of Perú, and is a part of the collection of The Brooklyn Museum in New York.

This performance takes place at the Puente de Cal y Canto bridge in Santiago de Chile, constructed during colonial times at the site where an Inka rope bridge had once connected the south and north of Chile. Vicuña invited friends and passersby to join in creating "a living knot" (un nudo vivo), to recover the memory of the sacred Mapocho Valley and its river, now deeply contaminated. This is one of several "performance-knots" of her Quipu Mapocho, conducted between 2016 and 2017.

Noche de las especies [Night of the Species], a video animation by Robert Kolodny based on Cecilia Vicuña's drawings from the Noche de las especies.

A film by Robert Kolodny using poems and sounds of Cecilia Vicuña and auditory landscapes of musician Ricardo Gallo, telling the story of the death of the Earth's pollinating insects.