Cecilia Vicuña is a poet, artist, activist and filmmaker whose work addresses pressing concerns of the modern world, including ecological destruction, human rights, and cultural homogenization. Born and raised in Santiago de Chile, she has been in exile since the early 1970s, after the military coup against the president Salvador Allende. In London, she was a co-founder of Artists for Democracy in l974. She coined the term “Arte Precario” in the mid-1960s in Chile. Vicuña has re-invented the ancient Pre-Columbian quipu (knot in Quechua) system of non-writing with knots through ritual acts that weave the urban landscape, rivers and oceans, as well as people, envisioned as poems in space.
