Cecilia Vicuña began making her own interpretations of the Andean quipu as a teenager in Chile. Historical quipus used coloured and knotted cords to encode information, but Vicuña treats the idea more freely, describing her works as poems in space. Some are made from enormous lengths of unspun wool that viewers can physically walk among.
That scale changes everything.
A knot normally fits in a hand. Enlarge the idea until threads descend through architecture and the viewer effectively enters the writing.
Vicuña has said that people walking through Quipu Austral become part of the knots themselves. Wind and sunlight can also move the fibres, meaning the work continues changing after installation.
I like the contradiction between ancient memory technology and extreme material fragility.
We tend to imagine information preservation as making something permanent.
Vicuña does something stranger. Meaning survives through an object that can move, fray and eventually disappear.
Perhaps memory does not always need a permanent container.
Sometimes it needs repetition.
