Cecilia Vicuña: About to Happen

Text by Andrea Andersson, Lucy Lippard, Macarena Gmez-Barris. Interview by Julia Bryan-Wilson.

Beginning and ending at the edge of the ocean at the sacred mouth of the Aconcagua River, About to Happen serves as a lament as well as love letter to the sea. In this artist's book, Chilean-born artist and poet Cecilia Vicua weaves personal and ancestral memory while summoning the collective power to confront the economic disparities and environmental crises of the 21st century.

Collecting the detritus that washes up on shore, Vicua assembles out of the refuse tiny precarios and basuritaslittle sculptures held together with nothing more than string and wire, which she sometimes makes as offerings to be reclaimed by the sea.

About to Happen traces a decades-long practice that has refused categorical distinctions and thrived within the confluences of conceptual art, land art, feminist art, performance and poetry. Vicua's nuanced visual poeticsoperating fluidly between concept and craft, text and textiletransforms the discarded into the elemental, paying acute attention to the displaced, the marginalized and the forgotten.

• Softcover
• 8 8 in.
• 160 pages
• 100 color illustrations, 8 black and white