Cecilia Vicuña at Castello di Rivoli: Inside the Quipu of the Vanished Glacier

A conversation with Marcella Beccaria on Cecilia Vicuña’s first solo museum exhibition in Italy. In the Manica Lunga, El glaciar ido is not only seen: it is crossed, heard, and felt on the body.

Link to the Italian shorter version on Artribune

My conversation with Marcella Beccaria did not take place across a table, in front of a recorder. It took place inside the Manica Lunga of Castello di Rivoli, as we walked through Cecilia Vicuña’s El glaciar ido (The vanished glacier / Il ghiacciaio scomparso): raw wool, bamboo and twine suspended in space like a lying-down quipu, recalling the ancient Andean systems of cords and knots used to record information and memory.

“El hilo siente la mano, como la palabra la lengua”, Vicuña writes in Palabra e hilo. The thread feels the hand, as the word feels the tongue. Inside the work, with Beccaria, that sentence no longer felt like a metaphor.

That detail matters because it says something simple about Vicuña’s work: it does not stay at a safe distance. It touches you before you fully understand it. Through wool, voice, silence, smell and movement, the work asks for attention before it asks for interpretation.

Perhaps this is where one should begin in order to understand Cecilia Vicuña’s first solo museum exhibition in Italy, curated by Marcella Beccaria and on view at Castello di Rivoli until September 20, 2026. Not from a definition, but from a minimal contact: a fragment of wool, a remnant, a basurita, to use a word dear to the artist. A small found thing, fragile, almost worthless, that forces you to stop.

Born in Santiago de Chile in 1948, Vicuña is an artist, poet, performer, filmmaker and activist. Her biography cannot be separated from Chilean history: the 1973 military coup against Salvador Allende, exile, the memory of the desaparecidos, the defense of Indigenous cultures, ecology as political responsibility. But to reduce her to a “political artist” would be too little.

It would also be too easy to place her inside words that contemporary art has learned to absorb: ecology, feminism, decoloniality, activism. In Vicuña, those words do not settle into labels. They remain active, unstable, material.

At Rivoli, this takes the form of a quipu acostado, a lying-down quipu suspended at different heights inside the Manica Lunga. Vicuña takes up the quipu not as an archaeological reference, but as a form that is still active. It becomes a memory you do not simply read. You walk through it.

Here, however, the quipu has no knots. It does not fully record. It marks a loss. The vanished glacier is not only the glacier of the Susa Valley, or of the Andes, or the one climate change continues to erase. It is also what a civilization forgets, what colonialism has destroyed, what dictatorships have made disappear.

El glaciar ido

It is Vicuña herself who brings the quipu back to its historical wound:

The Catholic church in the beginning, when they came to Peru and they saw that people had these quipu, they thought they were mops for cleaning the floor. It’s true. The colonial documents say this is a mop.

And so they paid no importance to the quipu. But then when the conquerors started to appropriate the land, and the people arrived in the courts, the Spanish courts with quipus in their hands, because in the quipu was the evidence that this community owned this land, you know, so when they saw that the quipus had meaning, then the quipu was forbidden. And the quipucamayoc, the people who knew how to read and make notes, killed, and end of quipu.

And it was a radical, violent destruction of an ancient system of knowledge. And recently in the 70s, or even later after the 70s, I believe in the 90s, some American archaeologists discovered that some form of quipu had survived in isolated communities in the Andes. And so it’s a wonderful thing because this community, even though the last generation who knew how to decipher the quipus died in the 70s, and they did not transmit to the new generation the knowledge. So they keep the quipus, but they don’t even know it to read. Not even there. So the loss of this knowledge is something that really hurts my heart. When I do a quipu such as this one, for me it’s an act of hope that a different form of knowledge may come when we collectively work in the creation of a communication system that is not of the linear kind. It’s not something that you can explain clearly, but that you feel.

I spoke with Marcella Beccaria, curator of the exhibition and Deputy Director of Castello di Rivoli, while crossing the work with her.

Interview with Marcella Beccaria

We are inside the Manica Lunga, walking through the installation. How important is it that El glaciar ido is not only seen, but crossed?

It is fundamental. This is not a frontal work. It has to be walked through. Cecilia imagined for the Manica Lunga a quipu that is lying down, sleeping, suspended at different heights. As you move, perception changes. The visitor’s body enters the measure of the work.

The wool is not only a material to be looked at. It has presence, smell, lightness, vulnerability. It can almost touch you. The work asks for another kind of time, different from the speed with which we often consume images of exhibitions today.

The relationship between Cecilia Vicuña and Castello di Rivoli did not begin with this exhibition. Where does it start?

Castello di Rivoli had already presented Cecilia’s work in 2000, in the exhibition Quotidiana. On that occasion she created Canoa de luz, a work conceived for Rivoli but presented at Casa del Conte Verde.

There is also an earlier connection with Turin. For Cecilia, Turin was important as a place of poetic recognition. For her, the visual practice is always part of a larger condition of being a poet. Poetry runs through all of her work.

I had known her work for many years. When I was working in the United States, I collaborated on Inside the Visible, where Cecilia was included at a time when she was not yet the internationally recognized artist she is today. This exhibition comes from a long relationship, not only from three years of work.

Why a glacier at Castello di Rivoli?

The project comes from listening to the place. When Cecilia came back here, she looked a lot at the landscape, the mountains, the snow. We spoke about the geological history of Rivoli, the morainic amphitheater, the sediments left by ancient glaciers.

The Castello stands on remains carried down by glaciers that are no longer there. The lakes of Avigliana are a memory of water from that glacial landscape. This struck Cecilia deeply. The glacier is not only a natural presence. It is also a remote memory, something that shaped the territory and that we often no longer remember.

What does a quipu acostado mean here?

For Cecilia, the quipu is never only a form. It is memory passing through threads. It records, connects, and sometimes fails to transmit. In Andean cultures, and later in the Inca world, quipus were systems of knotted cords able to record administrative, astronomical, historical, and perhaps even narrative information.

At Rivoli Cecilia imagined it as lying down, sleeping, horizontal, conceived specifically for the Manica Lunga. It is not simply an artwork placed in a space. It is born from the structure of the building and from the geological history of the territory.

This contemporary quipu has no knots. Why is that so important?

Because the absence of the knot indicates a loss. In ancient quipus, the knot held information. In Cecilia’s quipu, that absence refers to the progressive loss of memory and attention toward the world that hosts us.

The project looks at what disappears or has already disappeared: glaciers, of course, but also the desaparecidos, the victims of the Chilean dictatorship, the people silenced or eliminated by repressive governments. The missing knot tells us that something is no longer legible, that a transmission has been interrupted.

The exhibition speaks about ecology, but avoids didacticism. How is that balance kept?

Cecilia never works in an illustrative way. In her work, ecology does not arrive now because it has become urgent. It has always been there. Since the 1960s she has spoken of Arte Precario, working with ephemeral materials, small remains, debris, found things, what she also calls basuritas.

That is why it was important for the exhibition not only to speak about sustainability, but to practice it in its processes. Cecilia wanted materials that would not betray the thought of the work: wool, bamboo, twine. No nylon, no steel, no plastic. This too, for her, is part of the work.

Before the installation, Vicuña wanted to ask permission from the mountain. Is that where the exhibition begins?

For me, yes. Before beginning, Cecilia told me that we had to ask permission from the mountain. So we went to the foot of Mont Blanc. It is not technically in Piedmont, but in this part of the Alpine arc it is the strongest glacial presence. There was still a lot of snow. Cecilia embraced the mountain and sang. It was just her and me.

It was not a gesture meant to be spectacularized, but it says a great deal about her way of working. For her there is no rigid separation between people, things, landscape and matter. The work is born inside this relation.

The exhibition also involves the territory and the Accademia Albertina. How was this participatory part built?

We thought of projects that would precede and accompany the exhibition. First there were walks in the territory, open to the public, to learn about the morainic hill, the glacial lakes, the waterways. Participants could collect small materials, as Cecilia does during her own walks.

Then we began a collaboration with the Accademia Albertina di Belle Arti in Turin. Through an open call, we involved a group of students in the preparation process. Cecilia cared very much about their presence. With part of the collected materials, the group created a kind of canoe, also in memory of Canoa de luz. The collective installation is called Quipu Canoa and was left to the elements: sun, wind, water.

It is not a work by Cecilia Vicuña. It is a collective work by the students. But it fully belongs to the generative process of the exhibition.

At one point you said that this is a necessary work more than a beautiful one. What did you mean?

Beauty is a complex word. The work can certainly appear very beautiful, but I do not think Cecilia conceives it in order to be beautiful. It is necessary. You can see it as a glacier that melts, as pieces of snow dissolving, as something that transforms over time.

It is fragile, but not weak: the wool can change, move, be reattached. It is alive. The passage of the public and the way the space changes as you cross it are part of the experience.

The work is difficult to replace with a photograph. How does it resist the speed of images?

I do not think one can really prevent exhibitions from being photographed. Today shows are photographed, shared, consumed quickly. But this work resists because there is no real substitute for being here.

You have to come here. You have to walk. You have to smell the wool, feel the body almost touched by the material, listen to the way sound changes as you move. It is not about producing a successful image. It is about an experience that passes through the body.

There is a difference between seeing an exhibition and visiting an exhibition. Often we want to see everything, but we inhabit nothing. Here the work asks for another kind of time. It asks us not to stop at the surface of the image.

The idea of disappearance in Vicuña’s work is not only environmental. There is also a political wound.

Yes. For Cecilia, disappearance is also the disappearance of the desaparecidos. There is not only the ice that melts, not only the mountain that loses matter. There is the disappearance of political ideals, of bodies, of memories, of people.

The videos in the exhibition help deepen this dimension. Quipu Mapocho, for example, is connected to the Mapocho River, which crosses Santiago de Chile and is tied to the history of violence and disappearance during the dictatorship. The red quipus refer not only to water, but also to blood.

The exhibition is about the void disappearance leaves behind. A void made of ice, politics, bodies, history and affection.

How much does the 1973 Chilean coup weigh in the reading of Vicuña’s work?

It weighs a great deal, even when it is not explicitly declared. Cecilia was in London on a scholarship when the coup against Salvador Allende took place. Her family was close to Allende and was affected by the dictatorship. This marked her life.

But we should not read her work only as biographical testimony. Her practice comes from personal experience, of course, but it becomes a broader form of political awareness. For Cecilia, ecology and politics are deeply connected. To defend a river, a glacier, a language, a community, a memory: these gestures belong to the same field.

Vicuña is also a feminist figure, but not in a softened or easily institutionalized sense. How does a public museum preserve the force of an artist like her?

By taking her work seriously. If you invite Cecilia Vicuña, you invite the full complexity of her practice: poetry, activism, feminism, ecology, decolonial thought, political memory, Indigenous knowledge. You cannot invite Cecilia only for the beauty of the wool.

Of course, a public museum must maintain democratic respect for everyone, including those who may hold different positions. But democratic respect does not mean flattening the work. It does not mean removing its force.

We are living through a historical moment marked by wars and new forms of censorship, even in countries that have long presented themselves as defenders of democracy. In this context, a work like this matters because it does not simply use the correct words. It does not do greenwashing. It does not adopt a fashionable vocabulary. It comes from more than fifty years of coherent work.

Are the videos and wall poems also a way to keep Vicuña’s voice present?

Yes. I wanted Cecilia’s voice to be present in the exhibition even when she is not physically here. The videos bring images, songs, sounds and performative actions into the project. Semiya, for example, is connected to an idea from 1971, when Allende was still president and had asked young people to contribute proposals for the renewal of Chile. Cecilia proposed replanting parts of the country with forests and crops, distributing seeds to peasants and communities.

This is important because it shows that her ecological thought did not begin recently. It is not a position built after ecology became central in the cultural system. It is something she has carried since a time when very few people were speaking about it in those terms.

The wall poems are also essential. Cecilia is first of all a poet, or perhaps it is better to say that poetry is the condition through which all her works exist. The poem is not decoration. It is another way for the work to breathe.

What would you like visitors to carry with them after the exhibition?

I would like them to carry a physical experience, not only information. Visitors can read about the history of the quipu, the geology of the place, the biography of the artist, the Chilean context. All of this is important. But the quipu must also stand on its own.

I would like people entering the Manica Lunga to understand that disappearance does not concern only what we no longer see. It also concerns the way we lose attention, memory and relation.

In the end, El glaciar ido is not an exhibition about the glacier as an image of catastrophe. It is an exhibition about what remains after something has already disappeared.

The glacier is not reconstructed. It is invoked as absence. The quipu does not fully preserve memory. It shows how fragile preservation can be. The wool does not turn loss into a monument. It leaves it exposed, fragile, almost too close to the skin.

That small flake of wool that landed on my clothes, which I picked up almost instinctively and kept, may say something about the work better than many explanations. It was not a piece of the installation to be owned. It was a trace. A minimal passage of matter from the work to the body.

Before the museum, the mountain. Before the artwork, permission. Before explanation, a gesture.