Vicuña was born in 1948 and spent her early years living with her father’s extended family in La Florida, an undeveloped stretch of land just south of Santiago. She went to the local public school, made of adobe, and at home she ran wild with roosters in the orchards, bathing her dolls in the irrigation ditch, eating purple grapes from the vine. There was no television, but there was a vast library in five languages, where Vicuña would read “The Divine Comedy” in Italian and absorb what she could: “Not understanding opened the door to other forms of imagining.” Her grandfather, a principled lawyer, defended Pablo Neruda in court when the government wanted him jailed for his politics. Her grandmother was a sculptor, and her Tía Rosa worked with clay she gathered herself from the mountains. They let Vicuña play “like a little rat in their studios — nobody paid particular attention.”
Her mother’s people were of Indigenous Diaguita descent and came from a humble town called Los Andes. There was art in that family, too: Her mother, Norma, sang boleros, staged ballets with the children in the yard and painted household linens with birds and flowers. No one else considered Norma an artist, but she was her daughter’s greatest muse and ally: “She converted her life into an art form.”
In many ways, Vicuña’s upbringing was ideal. She had access to the resources of high culture, without the restrictions of formal education: “I was not instructed, so I was able to keep my freedom.” Her family spent summers in Concón, where the Aconcagua River feeds into the Pacific, leaving rich deposits of driftwood, shells and pebbles on shore. Vicuña has often referred to this beach as her “mine,” in ironic contrast to the industry that still serves as the cornerstone of Chile’s economy. Even back then, Concón wasn’t pure. Chile’s first oil refinery was built there, she told me, on the site of an Indigenous cemetery, and she remembers how the runoff turned her feet black with tar. But this is also where she learned to understand her sand spirals and tidal sculptures as a form of listening. She was not alone, perceiving the elements; the elements were also perceiving her. Later, she would explain how her work has always involved “responding to a sign, not imposing a mark.”
There were signs coming from the sea, and there were also signs coming from the streets, where a Socialist revolution was gaining momentum. In 1970, the Chilean people narrowly elected Salvador Allende as president. The new Popular Unity government transformed society, redistributing huge tracts of land from rich to poor, raising the minimum wage and establishing scholarships for Mapuche children. Vicuña’s favorite slogan from that period was “Ahora somos nosotros.” In a conversation with the curator Camila Marambio, she explained why: “It meant that we were one, as a people. It meant that now we owned our own resources, because copper had been nationalized.” But for her, “it translated to the freedom to be what we were, you know? Something chaotic, chacotero.” Ricardo, her younger brother, remembers Santiago as “the Berlin of Latin America”: He would walk home from downtown through the corridors of an infinite carnival. In a city of almost three million, “there were hundreds of independent theater companies.” Vicuña has described how she and her cousin collaborated with textile workers to dramatize, for example, the story of how their factory was nationalized. They would perform a scene for them, then ask for feedback: “How did things really happen?” “What changes do you propose?”
