Poetry In Fragments: The Paradox of Place in Cecilia Vicuña’s Pueblos de altares (1990-2019)

Nathan Clark

Abstract

Cecilia Vicuña’s work, Pueblos des Altares was in its evolutionary process from 1990-2019, and was first exhibited at Exit Art in New York while the artist lived there after being exiled from Chile. This work is Vicuña’s amalgamation of her precarios, or what she calls “little trashes,” all of which are poetic sculptural compositions created from washed up trash found on the beach of her hometown, Con cón, in Chile. Therefore, I ask the following in my paper: Through Vicuña’s ever-evolving and shifting collective material narrative and ritualistic process of Pueblos des Altares, how does her use of trash and sand from her hometown aid to rebuild a sense of home, and how do site-specific installations make meaning when they are constantly mobilized? I place Vicuña in historical dialogue with Kurt Schwitter’s Merzbau, who was inspired by his use of detritus within his sculptural environments. Schwitters, too, was in exile following the Nazi occupation of Germany. With these two artists in dialectical relations with each other, how does the poet/artist use language to convey the oscillation between realism and abstraction through form in sculptural ways, and how does this contextualize (or “make real”) the abstract of place and object, both exiled from their origins? How does Vicuña’s intimate connection to water and weaving aid her in building connections back to Con cón Beach, and what paradoxical limitations might be present in her reconstruction of this place? I use Adorno’s “collective undercurrent” found in poetry as a potential synthesis between the issue of fragmentation and longing for place in a Capitalist-dominated world. Ultimately, both I and Vicuña see the ocean itself as the medium and mediator of these poetic and personal experiences. Vicuña, in her ritualized production of place, mobilized the localized and indigenous meaning of Con cón through her position as an exiled artist illustrating that land and water weave their connections to place through constant, albeit shifting, sense of a place’s local, and even global, meaning embedded in both the land and the individual.