Learn more from Vicuña about the first Precarios she created as a teenager in Concón.
Transcript:
Cecilia Vicuña: My father realized that I was a little reader—not only writer but I was, above all, a reader, that I devoured everything [laughing] that was in that house. And so he gave me a subscription to Encyclopaedia Britannica, and the Encyclopaedia Britannica had a series for youngsters, for teenagers. And every year they had a yearbook. And I remember that it was probably the year 1965 that the yearbook had an essay, an article about the club of Rome, a gathering of scientists that warned that the world was going to come to an end if the destructive activity could go on the way it was happening. So I learned that, and I knew that my life work would be precisely about that. So I was turned into an activist as a teenager.
And so I think that operated in sort of mysterious deep level in me because my first works when I became aware—just as I had become aware that I was a writer—that I was an artist were given to me by the ocean. And this happened in Concon. Concon is one of the most sacred sites, with culture going back 10,000 years.
And it was the site selected by the Chilean government to place the first oil refinery. So when I was growing up, playing on the beach of Concon, the sole of my feet were already black with petroleum. And we didn’t think of it as pollution, but we knew it was there. We knew we would come home and had to spend hours trying to remove that black thing from our fingers, from our toes.
So this was part of my body, part of my being. And my art began one day when I felt that the sea, the light, the sun, everything was aware. I sort of dissolved, disappeared as a person, and I just became someone who grabbed a little stick lying about and I planted it as a sign that I could see that everything around me was aware. So it’s a kind of activism that operates in the acknowledgement of the awareness of the world around us. Comes from the understanding that your awareness is possible because everything is aware.
Somehow I had clarity to understand that that was a new kind of art—new, perhaps, because it is ancestral; new, because it’s probably thousands of years old; new, because perhaps we forgot it. And now it’s coming back.
Was it ritual? Was it performance? Was an act of awareness? It was all of that. At the time, nobody used the word “performance,” and so it predates any sort of affiliation to a known category. And that’s why I call it art de precario, creating my own category.
