Faculty of Arts & Science

Visual and Critical Studies

Karina Roman Justo

Cecilia Vicuña’s Disappeared Quipu (2018): Materializing Indigenous Knowledges through Artistic Practice

What happens when the quipu, a knot-record Andean system and device –used during the Incan Empire (1438-1533) – is removed from study of anthropology and becomes focus of a contemporary art practice? What does the quipu as an art form have to say about the place of Indigenous histories and knowledge in the contemporary world? My paper responds to these questions by analysing how Chilean artist Cecilia Vicuña in her installation Disappeared Quipu (2018), displayed at the Brooklyn Museum, utilizes the quipu to forefront Indigenous knowledges by employing its aesthetics, its history and the concepts it encompasses. To do so, I frame Vicuña’s practice within past and present understandings of Andean weaving and the quipu, and by thinking through Aymara-Bolivian subaltern scholar Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui’s proposal of a ch’ixi world, to explore how the material and the conceptual aspects of this artwork imbue the quipu with multiple contemporary meanings and resonances.