I began to define my work as “about to happen” in the 1970s. This is my view of how art exists: art is not what you think it is, but art is what is a… - Cecilia Vicuña

If you think that you don’t know, you don’t know. But if you think that you may know, if you think that it’s perfectly possible that you have a knowing, then you can find it. So it’s a matter of opening. It’s a matter of releasing the structures that have been imposed upon you, realising that every form of education is an imposition that’s coming from outside your being. I think the liberating force of art and poetry is that it releases you from that, and it puts you in the place of discovering, of exploring, of acknowledging that you have senses, that you have awareness, that you perceive and are paying attention to the precise form of those perceptions. That’s the joy of the poet, the joy of the artist, to focus completely, zero in on those perceptions and see the universe expanding out of ‘a grain of sand’, as William Blake said. Everything has infinite possibilities of knowledge and that’s what it means to be human. We have been brought up to believe that the machine knows better than we do. Everybody believes that now. That’s preposterous! Machines only know how to do operations, they can’t imagine, they can’t imagine the unimagined, they can’t travel like we can to the end of the galaxies just by thinking about it. So, why are we so willing to renounce our agency as creators? That is what is troubling.

words
are the loom
of the stars life's breath

Our understanding of time is so limited. We have very basic markers of time. We live and we die, but what else? In my opinion, a poem is created outside of time entirely. A quipu, on the other hand, is like traveling through time. We all experience this ability to travel back and forth in time in our souls, in our imaginations, and in our hearts. Mathematicians and physicists attempt to create these fantastic theories and equations, but I have been making art about this all along. I think that poetry has given me this gift of knowing. Not every poet has this. I think it is reserved to certain cultures, perhaps. One must open themselves to these other forms of knowing, but Western cultures have suppressed this. I call it a colonization of the mind.