Tertulia 14: SLOW DOWN FAST – a toda raja

Presented by: Cecilia Vicuña

Slow Down Fast / A Toda Raja (2019, Errant Bodies Press) is the latest collaboration between Cecilia Vicuña and Camila Marambio.
In this brilliant intergenerational dialogue, curator Camila Marambio and Cecilia Vicuña, one of the most intriguing Indoamerican artists of our times, converse about mestizaje/miscenegation, ecological disaster, eroticism and decolonization in their multilingual, irreverent and humorous slang.

The book, which they began working on in 2015 through recorded meetings that were then transcribed, is published in Berlin by Errant Bodies Press, and will be presented by Cecilia Vicuña, with Camila Marambio present via Skype.

“The true performance is that of our species on Earth: the way we cause suffering to others, the way we warm the atmosphere or cause other species to disappear.
When we began this book-conversation in 2015, we shared a practice of the transformative power of performance, or pre-formance, dreaming of ways to extend it. Today, the #FridaysForFuture, #MeToo movement, #BlackLivesMatter, and other mobilizations for refugees and ecological justice have changed the meaning of past and future performance, unleashing the potential of a quantum change in collective consciousness.
May our words contribute to empower its rising energy!”

The event will take place at the Errant Bodies Studio, in conjunction with the Tertulias organized by Kap Hoorn.

Moderated by Brandon LaBelle

CECILIA VICUÑA: Cecilia Vicuña’s work has addressed ecological destruction, human rights, and cultural homogenization, since her first poems and paintings, made in Chile during the 1960s. Her performances and installations, such as the Quipu (created in nature, streets, and in museums), combine ritual and assemblage elements in a practice that Vicuña calls lo precario (precariousness): transformative acts that bridge art and life, the ancestral and the avant-garde. Her paintings, poetry, and Palabrarmas (prints and collages that create new meanings by decomposing signifiers in words) all propose a free and futuristic vision considered pioneering indigenous decolonization. Her work can be found in the collections of museums such as the Guggenheim and MoMA in New York, the Tate Modern, London, MoMA and the Guggenheim Museum in New York and the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in Santiago, Chile. Her first retrospective exhibition, Veroir el Fracaso Iluminado/Seehearing the Enlightened Failure, organized by the Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, opens on May 26th, 2019.