César Vallejo wrote almost a century ago that the artist must “raise great and cosmic urgencies for human justice” and his vision of art’s interaction with the world becomes increasingly urgent as injustice increases and epigenetics demonstrates that our Way of being affects genes, and not the other way around. That is, the love of justice could be a real transmission, an imaginative force with the power to change the world, if enough people felt that way.
María Sabina said: “justice is healing,” and her words resonate with me.
I grew up in a universe of beings persecuted for their love of justice. Since I was a child, I saw that writing and art were the only redemption for my grandparents. Maybe that’s why I was born with a pencil in my hand, writing/painting as if my life depended on it. I grew up in Chile in a period of peace, enjoying the teaching of my elders in the glorious period that brought Salvador Allende to power. The military coup of 1973 broke the enchantment of that communal life of workshops, orchards and libraries in which our family lived.
“I fell exhausted to the ground, I touched and caressed the sand, already transformed into an elemental being who knew that this was art”
My art had begun before on a specific day in l966 in Concón. Suddenly I understood that the sea and the light felt to me like I felt to them. I saw that my feelings affected the environment, and vice versa, and that this interaction extended to all living things. I was one of those despised little sticks, about to disappear whipped by the waves and the wind. Understanding it gave rise to my precarious art, to the rubbish and quipus of my life, which is sacred because it disappears. There was the beauty, in the fragrance of the interaction of the total fabric. I fell exhausted to the ground, I touched and caressed the sand, already transformed into an elemental being who knew that this was the art: understanding the infinite beauty of what is.
I wrote “art is consciousness”, not what is seen and heard, but the way in which it is seen and heard. The word “form” originally was “appearance,” from the Greek morphmetamorphosis. The form is always in transformation. Their existence is precarious and luminous. The form shares its being and gives, transforming and being transformed by what exists around it.
[Ignasi Aballí. Errores y aciertos]
Art is nothing and it is everything at the same time. Indefinable and accurate it captures the moment. It guards and reveals contradiction, and that is its engine.
Now that humanity is accelerating its possible extinction, art today would be to survive, to coexist. Take care of the waters, humidity and humility.
Remember the impossible.
The human of the human, freedom threatened by authoritarian violence.
Art is dangerous because it frees usmaking us what we are.
Art is the ancestral inheritance of the hand, it grew from hand to hand, learning to touch, feel, mold, imagine, for millions of years.
Art now is to imagine, to magnetize the image of a collective action of love.
Awaken the dormant moral compass that accepts war and genocide.
‘Quipu menstrual’, 2019. Photo: Roberto Ruiz / CA2M
Recover human capacity to feel one’s own pain as well as that of others.
Art is feeling, cleansing the look, making the truth of seeing seen.
Remember the double human being: being one and all at the same time.
The Mbyá Guarani wise men of the now destroyed jungle said:
“Even if they want to deviate from the love that gathers, they will not succeed.”
“Hate is forked love.”
The wise Karai Miri Poty said: “We must resist from beauty.” “Violence only brings violence.”
In the traditional indigenous peoples of the world, everyone is an artist in the ceremonial party, in the moment when all together we are a single being, a collective body.
The art of today is to unite, to join the desire for peace. Stop the destruction of the earth and human life.
Cecilia Vicuna (Santiago de Chile, 1948) is an artist, poet and activist. The Velázquez Prize for Plastic Arts (2019) made him known in our country, shortly after his participation in Documenta 14 in Athens and Kassel (2017), and his exhibition ‘See the illuminated failure’ at the CA2M Móstoles and Kunstinstituut Melly Rotterdam was very celebrated. National Prize for Plastic Arts in Chile (2023), he recently showed his ‘Brain Forest Quipu’ at the Tate Modern in London (2022).
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2023-12-10 01:15:26
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