Highlighting its links with Chile, Argentina, the Andes mountain range, pre-Columbian textile memory, feminist struggles and eroticism, and with the demands for self-determination of indigenous communities, Dreaming Water is the most thorough monograph dedicated to the work of Chilean artist Cecilia Vicuña to date. Vicuña coined the term “Arte Precario” in the mid-1960s as a new category for her works composed of debris and structures that disappear in the landscape, and which also include her quipus (“knot” in Quechua), envisioned as poems in space.

Since the 1960s, Cecilia Vicuña's visionary work has been dedicated to honoring the balance and reciprocity of the natural world, without attacking or intervening violently in it. Sixty years after the establishment of the military dictatorship in Brazil (1964), fifty years after the military coup in Chile (1973) and forty years after Argentina's return to democracy (1983), this publication reminds us of Vicuña's commitment to the struggles popular beliefs, respect for human rights and the importance of confronting devastation in its broad spectrum, and calls us to collectivity and recognize ourselves as sensitive beings capable of transforming reality.

Dreaming Water brings together over 200 works—including paintings, drawings, screenprints, collages, textiles, videos, photographs, installations, poetry, artist books and performances—created throughout the artist’s remarkable career. It also features several stimulating texts—a lengthy epistolary piece by curator and editor Miguel A. López as well as new essays by anthropologist Elizabeth A. Povinelli, curator Catherine de Zegher and art historian José de Nordenflycht. Vicuña herself contributes two texts, reflecting on her drawings from the “Palabrarmas” project and the activism of the group Artists for Democracy, which she cofounded in 1974. A rousing conversation between Vicuña, anthropologist Marisol de la Cadena and curator Camila Marambio also figures in the book, blending the artist’s voice with those who are experts in fields pertinent to her practice. [publisher's note]