Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 October 2020
Woven through the threads of the poetry, performance, and visual art of Cecilia Vicuña are the image and metaphor of weaving itself, a visual and cultural reminder of an other—indigenous and feminine—form of forging cultural memory. Ever committed to using the aesthetic both to remember the violent exclusions of history and to explore the perpetuation and transformation of the marginalizing structures of power in the present, Vicuña's multigenre work spans over thirty years of Chile's turbulent history of struggle with dictatorship and toward democracy. This essay analyzes the interlacing of textile and text in quipoem, a collection of the poetry and visual art of this author-artist that re-presents a constantly evolving theorization of the complex relation between aesthetics and politics, writing and difference, and memory and power in the postcolonial, postdictatorship context of the Americas in the age of neoliberal globalization.