Cecilia Vicuña: Cinepoetics

Cecilia Vicuña's (b. 1948 in Santiago, Chile; lives and works in New York and Santiago) multidimensional work integrates poetry, performance, sculpture, film and textile in response to pressing concerns of the modern world, including ecological destruction, human rights, and cultural homogenization. Vicuña's presents readings and moving-image works, followed by a conversation with Daniel Borzutzky.

Born and raised in Santiago, she was exiled during the early 1970s after the violent military coup against President Salvador Allende. This sense of impermanence, and a desire to preserve and pay tribute to the indigenous history and culture of Chile, have characterized her work throughout her long career. Two of Vicuña’s numerous ongoing bodies of work includes precarios, fragile spatial poems in which she combines feathers, stone, plastic, wood, wire, shells, cloth, and other human-made detritus, and Quipus, site-specific wool installations which evoke the Incan method of visual communication and record keeping. Vicuña is the author of 25 poetry volumes, including: New And Selected Poems of Cecilia Vicuña, Kelsey Street Press, 2018, About to Happen, Siglio Press, 2017, and Read Thread, the Story of the Red Thread, Sternberg Press, 2017. Vicuña’s solo exhibition, Disappeared Quipu, opens at Museum of Fine Arts Boston, on view October 20, 2018 – January 21, 2019.

Daniel Borzutzky

Winner of the 2016 National Book Award for Poetry for his collection The Performance of Becoming Human, Daniel Borzutzky is a Chilean-American writer and translator living in Chicago. His other poetry books are Lake Michigan, In the Murmurs of the Rotten Carcass Economy, The Book of Interfering Bodies, The Ecstasy of Capitulation, and the chapbook Failure in the Imagination. He has published one collection of fiction, Arbitrary Tales. His books of translation include Song for his Disappeared Love by Raul Zurita and Port Trakl by Jaime Luis Huenun.

In collaboration with Woodberry Poetry Room.