ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates Cecilia Vicuña’s artistic response to colonialism and its embedded gendered, ecological violence. Using poetry, chanting and weaving people together with unspun wool, Vicuña creates public performance art that intentionally blurs the psychic and physical space between art and audience. Woven through performance are the image and metaphor of weaving itself, a visual and cultural reminder of an indigenous and feminine form of forging cultural memory. Jill Bennett’s ideas of “empathic vision” are used as frame: how art induces connection and empathy before the rational thought. This thinking through the body-mind undergirds critical awareness. Vicuña’s intertwining of multiple modes allows colonial, ecological and female trauma to exist in a space that is both healing and alive to critical response. For Vicuña, the multi-faceted weaving brings everything together on a cosmic level—the voice contains the potential of existing as a bridge between cosmos, our unconscious, the earth, and humanity.
