Appearing on the occasion of Vicuna's installation in Athens for documenta 14, Read Thread tells the story of the sanguine thread in Vicuna's work. A tension arises in the asymmetry of Andean weaving and the artist's quipus--large-scale immersive installations of thread, wool, and yarn that reference the pre-Columbian language of knotting, a type of weaving-as-writing. Vicuna's translation of the quipu into a spatial and performative poetics conveys the tension of ecological disaster and reparation as well as a bodily sense of the cosmic scale of landscape, history, and time.
Alongside documentation of Vicuna's quipus, this publication includes hybrid compositions--poetic texts and narratives--written by the artist especially for this project, often relating the works to their political and historical context. Essays by documenta 14 curator Dieter Roelstraete and art historian Jose de Nordenflycht Concha complete the book.
Contributors
Jose de Nordenflycht Concha, Dieter Roelstraete, Cecilia Vicuna
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