Chanccani Quipu

The Chilean artist and poet Cecilia Vicuña has worked with quipus since the beginning of her career. These devices, made from knotted strings and used since approximately 3000 BCE by several cultures in Andean South America, record information that could be read with both fingers and eyes. In 1966 Vicuña made a work of conceptual art called A Quipu That Remembers Nothing, which consisted of her thinking about a quipu. She made this one nearly five decades later from skeins of unspun wool on which she stenciled a poem, which she describes as “a prayer for the rebirth of a way of writing with breath, a way of perceiving the body and the cosmos as a whole engaged in a continuous reciprocal exchange.”