REMEMBERING THE EMPTINESS

KHIPUS AS INCORPORETED KNOWLEDGE BY CECILIA VICUÑA, THIS STRANGE TRANSLATOR

Abstract

Abstract: This essay seeks to investigate the work of Chilean artist Cecilia Vicuña in relation to Andean khipus, beginning with The quipu that remembers nothing as a mnemonic reinscription of resistance. The goal is to understand how Vicuña has transformed this ancestral artifact into an artistical and political practice of translation and cultural reinvention. To this end, the methodology consists in an interdisciplinary analysis of her works, articulating performance studies (Taylor, 2013), Andean philosophy (Cusicanqui, 2021), and translation criticism (Benjamin, 2013; Faleiros, 2019). The emptiness, central to her khipus, is reinterpreted as a space of creation and possibility, not mere absence, operating a “cannibalistic translation” that restores meanings erased by coloniality, activating an ancestral present in objects that transcend the material in living performances that breaks with dichotomies. Pieces like Sonoran Quipu exemplify her collaborative and precarious method, which destabilizes boundaries between art and life, artist and audience. Thus, her poetics act in concert with the act of “walking backward”: a countercolonial gesture that seeks to reverse historical erasures and imagine new horizons of existence and planetary connection.