Cecilia Vicuña: Seehearing the Enlightened Failure

Cecilia Vicuña: Seehearing the Enlightened Failure is published in conjunction with Cecilia Vicuña, a retrospective exhibition, curated by Miguel A. López and held at Witte de With from May to November 2019.

Overlapping autobiography with sharp political reflection, Vicuña weaves visceral entanglements between word and seed, sound and thread, quipu and blood, body and dust, or rubbish and cosmos. This exhibition is the most comprehensive survey of a groundbreaking artist who has been deeply influential among her peers and for later generations.

Cecilia Vicuña: Seehearing the Enlightened Failure is edited by Miguel A. López and designed by Studio Manuel Raeder in Berlin. It includes a forward by Sofía Hernández Chong Cuy, new essays by Miguel A. López, Julia Bryan-Wilson and Carla María Macchiavello, alongside existing essays by Lucy R. Lippard and Dawn Adès, an anthology of texts authored by Cecilia Vicuña, and a number of previously unpublished visual documentations that expands our understanding of her work.

The book is fully illustrated. It includes color and black and white photography of more than 120 artworks by Vicuña, encompassing the full range of Vicuña’s body of work: textiles, poetry, performances, film, collages, drawings, paintings, precarious objects, and activism. A chapter in the book is especially devoted to these images, which are organized in four thematic sections.