KASSEL.- The National Council of Culture and Arts Chile announced that artist Cecilia Vicuña is participating in documenta 14. Documenta, now in its 14th edition, consists of two venues: Athens, Greece and Kassel, Germany where it originated sixty years ago. The poet and visual artist Cecilia Vicuña and the project Open City of Ritoque were selected by the curator of the exhibition, Dieter Roelstraete, to be part of this edition.

Vicuña, who started her career in the 1960s, was co-founder of the Tribu No group and has lived in New York since 1980. Throughout her career she has developed a body of work in which she addresses political, environmental and various issues of modern life through poetry, visuals and performance, in order to generate a connection between art and life, the ancestral and the vanguard.

In Athens, Vicuña presented one of her traditional Quipus, an artifact built in situ that the artist has created in different places for about fifty years. Vicuña states: "The way in which the Quipu has been received has become the emblem of documenta in Athens, every day I learn new things that have happened in relation to that Quipu. The reception from the public has been completely visceral when confronted with this immense white room and this river of blood of 8 meters that hangs from the ceiling that the human body perceives as a giant waterfall”.

In addition to the Quipu, the artist performed a ritual in the coastal region of Limanakia, located 15km from Athens. Vicuña will repeat this performance in Kassel on the banks of the river Fulda.

In addition to these two works, Cecilia Vicuña presents a sample of oil paintings from the seventies at the Neue Gallery in Kassel, called Heroes of the Revolution and Women Poets. This selection includes the mythical portraits of historical figures such as Marx, Lenin, Fidel Castro, Salvador Allende, Violeta Parra, Gabriela Mistral and María Sabina. Works such as La muerte de Allende and El ángel de la Mestruación are being displayed. These works have been stored for more than 40 years and now are being shown at documenta.

This year, in addition to documenta, Cecilia Vicuña is participating in the show About to Happen at the Contemporary Arts Center in New Orleans. Also the artist will present work at the Museum of Fine Arts in Santiago de Chile with Movimientos de Tierra shows that will be exhibited from July to August and will feature the participation of artists Patrick Steeger, Cristián Velasco with Totoral Lab, José Délano and Catalina Correa, as well as the renowned British artist Hamish Fulton.

Finally, the artist will be part of a show at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, California entitled Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960-1985, which will open in September this year.

Corporación Amerida with Ciudad Abierta (Open City) are also participating in documenta. This group was founded in 1979 in Ritoque, in the north of Valparaiso, by the School of Architecture and Design of the Pontifical Catholic University of Valparaíso, Chile. A group of professors from these schools presented Phalène Latin South America in Athens, a project that is created from a pedagogical and social experiment using archival materials inspired by the idea of a poetic act, called phalène, as an open poetry game which expresses the poetic condition, by the presence and actions of the participants.