“Diario de Vida” Cecilia Vicuña’s artistic practice in London (1972-1975) (A letter to Carla Macchiavello)
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1344/regac2018.1.05Keywords:
Contemporary Art, Migration, Networks, Chile, FeminismAbstract
On the 11th of September 1973, when the coup took place in Chile, artist Cecilia Vicuña was in London, studying at the Slade School of Art. In June 1973, feeling that the socialist government of Allende was under imminent threat, she started to create what she called a “diary of objects”, which then became the installation A Journal of Objects for the Chilean Resistance, exhibited in London in 1974. This text—a letter addressed to art historian Carla Macchiavello—discusses the relation between space, place and memory mobilized by Vicuña’s artworks A Journal of Objects for the Chilean Resistance (1973-74) and Ruca Abstracta (1974) while considering the artist´s experience of migration, and later exile, to London in the early 1970s and her strong political positioning against the coup in Chile.
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