A new edition of artist-poet Cecilia Vicuña's artist's book on the
politics of the sea
Beginning and ending at the edge of the ocean at the sacred mouth of the
Aconcagua River, About to Happen serves as a lament as well as love
letter to the sea. In this artist's book, Chilean-born artist and poet
Cecilia Vicuña weaves personal and ancestral memory while summoning the
collective power to confront the economic disparities and environmental
crises of the 21st century.
Collecting the detritus that washes up on shore, Vicuña assembles out of
the refuse tiny precarios and basuritas--little sculptures held
together with nothing more than string and wire, which she sometimes
makes as offerings to be reclaimed by the sea.
About to Happen traces a decades-long practice that has refused
categorical distinctions and thrived within the confluences of
conceptual art, land art, feminist art, performance and poetry. Vicuña's
nuanced visual poetics--operating fluidly between concept and craft,
text and textile--transforms the discarded into the elemental, paying
acute attention to the displaced, the marginalized and the forgotten.
