Cecilia Vicuña’s major art commission at Tate Modern invites the people of London to realize the benefits of the industrial revolution and also remember the concerns that have been raised about the survival of the planet.
For five weeks she turned the former industrial space at the heart of Britain’s largest gallery into a functioning studio. “For me, the Turbine Hall is beautiful,” she says. This chamber is full of history: “the coolness and the dampness of whatever pollution contamination happened here is still with us. Working in a space like that, it’s also a healing process. We cannot deny or negate what the industrial era has given us, we have to incorporate it but reorient it now. So that is a gift.”
Vicuña worked with teams of women from local Latin American communities to knot, weave, paint, and thread two gargantuan suspended columns, each skeletal white and strung with sea glass, hag stones, ceramic sherds, driftwood, and bird bones. They hang at either end of the Turbine Hall as a part of “Brain Forest Quipu.”
One part is imagined to be the mother, the other the child. The quipu is a knotted structure that Andean civilizations used as a counting and communication system: ancient knowledge that is worlds away from the clamorous, coal-fueled power station on the bank of the Thames that now houses Tate Modern.
As a Chilean who arrived in Britain back in 1972, she wanted to find some part of nature that was not controlled by human evolution. She hoped to find wilderness, something unmanicured, and the untamed Thames became that place that felt like home, for the landscape had remained untouched.
She wonders, what would happen to these massive pieces of art, the Brain Forest Quipu after next April. Will it be broken up, or preserved? No one has discussed it, she told me, “which is very telling, isn’t it? I think we’re at a time when we don’t know what’s permanent anymore because we are killing all life forms. Even our possibility of surviving as a species is in question.”
This perspective requires us to understand the severity of our position today in the modern world. Art, as Vicuña points out is a reliable medium, but often it depends on the people who receive it and strive to understand the meaning.
The “brain forest” of the title is not her invention Vicuña said: it relates to mycelial networks and other non-human intelligence. “Brain forest is how the earth thinks of itself.
Since the start of the pandemic, she has created seven monumental quipus, often through the hands of people with whom she shares no verbal language. For a 25-meter-high commission in Shanghai last year, she used Zoom to demonstrate the knotting process to a group of Chinese weavers. Technology and the passion to teach can truly yield magnificent results. Vicuña realizes this, for she says “The knowledge of my hands was transmitted via the screen, to the knowledge of their hands without words. And they understood how to do a quipu. The tactile knowledge of human hands is universal.”
The newly collective act of constructing these light yet monumental works has reinforced Vicuña’s sense of interconnectedness. “We are an individual and a collective at once. This is the teaching,” she says. Finding something common in today’s world is not difficult, the difference is in how far are we willing to go to make it into our legacy.