03/08/2022
Cecilia Vicuña Wins the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the 59th Venice Biennale
The Chilean artist and poet Cecilia Vicuña has been awarded the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement, along with the German artist Katharina Fritsch, at the 59th International Art Exhibition La Biennale di Venezia - The Milk of Dreams. The decision was announced today by the board of directors chaired by Roberto Cicutto, upon recommendation of this edition’s curator Cecilia Alemani. The award will be presented at the inaugural ceremony on April 23, 2022.
Based in New York and Santiago de Chile, Vicuña has developed an extensive body of work in which language, memory, dissolution, extinction, and exile stand out as relevant themes, articulating indigenous traditions and technologies, non-Western epistemologies, and ecological and feminist struggles in singular ways. La Escuela___ celebrates this well-deserved recognition of her sustained creative work, initiated in the 1960s with her "precarious works" and quipus, as a way of "hearing an ancient silence waiting to be heard."
Cecilia Vicuña's multi-dimensional works and thinking are of great interest to La Escuela___, as they propose processes of participation and active reflection in the spectator, encouraging a playful and critical approach at the same time. Her decolonizing take on knowledge, her understanding of feminism linked to ecology, and the possibilities of precariousness in Latin America as a potential for creation, are some of the topics we have addressed in conversation with her.
Cecilia Vicuña is the opening guest of La Escuela___’s digital Auditorium, where she will be imparting the lecture "School of Listening the IM pulse of the POSSIBLE" this Wednesday, March 9, at 6:00 pm (GMT-4), via Zoom. The event is organized in collaboration with the Carrera de Actualización "Tecnologías en el Arte Contemporáneo" - Secretaría de Posgrado, Facultad de Filosofía y Letras of the Universidad de Buenos Aires (UBA). It will include the participation of Professor Jazmín Adler (UBA) and a conversation panel moderated by Renata Cervetto, guest scholar at La Escuela___ for the 2022—I semester. Access is free and registration is still open. (The event will be held in Spanish.)