"Dreaming of water” A ch’ixi practices by Ceclia Vucuña
Katarzyna Cytlak, PhD
University of Torun, Poland

This text examines Cecilia Vicuña’s retrospective exhibition Dreaming of Water. A Retrospective of the Future (1964–…) at the Pinacoteca de São Paulo (2024) through the conceptual framework of ch’ixi developed by Bolivian thinker Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui. The ch’ixi concept—understood as a non-dialectical coexistence of difference that resists linear temporality and Eurocentric logic—serves as a key lens for interpreting Vicuña’s artistic practice. The exhibition presents Vicuña’s multidisciplinary work as a form of poetic, ecological, feminist, and political activism that consistently challenges Western artistic canons and colonial epistemologies. Through painting, visual poetry, video art, performance, and installation, Vicuña articulates an Andean cosmology grounded in cyclicality, care for nature, and collective responsibility.

Particular attention is given to works such as Semiya / Seed Song (2015), Paracas (1983), Palabrarmas (from 1966 onward), and Quipu menstrual (the blood of glaciers) (2006), which foreground themes of extinction, ecological violence, feminist ritual, and resistance to authoritarian power. Vicuña’s use of seeds, textiles, bodily gestures, and communal actions redefines artistic practice as an embodied, relational, and decolonizing process. Her work resonates with Rivera Cusicanqui’s call for an Andean iconography independent of European visual regimes and proposes art as a tangible means of imagining alternative modes of coexistence. Ultimately, the exhibition positions Vicuña’s practice as a lived enactment of a ch’ixi world—one in which ecological, social, and cultural tensions are not resolved but held together in a productive and ethical balance.

Image: Vicuña, Cecilia, Semiya / Seed Song (2015), video, color, 7’45’’, camera and editing Christan Chierego, Collection Cecilia Vicuña.