ABSTRACT
Cecilia Vicuña, one of Latin America’s most prominent contemporary artists, often grants bodies of water great importance not just as the subject of her work, but as active participants in it. Vicuña relates this vitalistic conception of water to the practices and heritage of Chile’s indigenous peoples. This chapter argues that Vicuña’s installations, video art and the ‘documentary poem’ Kon Kon (2010) articulate a fluid appeal to indigenous identity as a mechanism for ensuring future sustainability in the face of the ecological devastation wrought by Chile’s neoliberal extractivism. This appeal, particularly when viewed in the context of Vicuña’s status as an internationally renowned artist, encourages a rethinking of the models of ecological subjectivity offered by influential North American and European scholars in the environmental humanities, and provides the grounds for new understandings both of intermedial artistic practice and of the ‘politics of location’ in contemporary Latin American culture. Vicuña’s works both suggest and contest the identification of marine and digital spaces with global capitalism’s facile ideologies of flow. In doing so, they offer a vision of indigeneity that is liquid, but not without complexities and contradictions.
