Pioneering artist Cecilia Vicuña presented Clit Nest, a participatory and poetic performance that reimagines the Serpentine Pavilion’s roof as a connector to the cosmos and its cave-like interior as a womb.
For Clit Nest, a new participatory poetic performance, pioneering artist Cecilia Vicuña weaved a temporary nest for the clitoris of the earth, to birth collectively a culture of solidarity with the earth and each other.
With additional support by
Catherine Petigas
Lehmann Maupin
Cecilia Vicuña is a poet, artist, filmmaker and activist. Her work addresses pressing concerns of the modern world, including ecological destruction, human rights and cultural homogenisation. Born and raised in Santiago de Chile, she has been in exile since the early 1970s, after the military coup against president elect Salvador Allende. Vicuña began creating precarious works and quipus in the mid-1960s in Chile, as a way of “hearing an ancient silence waiting to be heard”. Her multi-dimensional works begin as a poem, an image that morphs into a film, a song, a sculpture, or a collective performance. These ephemeral, site-specific installations in nature, streets and museums combine ritual and assemblage. Vicuña calls this impermanent, participatory work “lo precario” (the precarious): transformative acts that bridge the gap between art and life, the ancestral and the avant-garde. Her paintings of early 1970s decolonised the art of the conquerors and the “saints” inherited from the Catholic Church, to create irreverent images of the heroes of the revolution. Vicuña’s work has featured in institutional exhibitions in at the Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes de Santiago, Santiago; the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA), London; Art in General in New York; Whitechapel Art Gallery, London; Berkeley Art Museum; Berkeley, Whitney Museum of American Art and MoMA, The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Vicuña has published numerous art and poetry books, including Kuntur Ko (Tornsound, 2015), Spit Temple: The Selected Performances of Cecilia Vicuña (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2012), Instan (Kelsey Street Press, 2001), Cloud Net (Art in General, 2000) and Selected Poems (Kelsey Street Press, 2017). In 2009, she co-edited The Oxford Book of Latin American Poetry: 500 years of Latin American Poetry (Oxford University Press) and is the editor of ÜL: Four Mapuche Poets (Latin American Literary Review Press, 1997). Vicuña was appointed the Messenger Lecturer 2015 at Cornell University, an honour bestowed on authors who contribute to the “evolution of civilisation for the special purpose of raising the moral standard of our political, business and social life”. Vicuña divides her time between Chile and New York.
