Invitation to the Species: Cecilia Vicuña

Sarah and Omar join Cecilia Vicuña as she travels through ancestral memory via tenderly-told stories of her childhood in Chile. From a young age, Vicuña came to define solidarity as the combination of love and creativity occuring in kinship, and so deeply mourns the connection lost to the pandemic and to racial injustice. Separated from people with whom we create art and movements, how do we go on? It is mountingly necessary for Vicuña’s continued poetry and art practice, which builds links out of a history that has been violently, deliberately obscured. She suggests that when our entire universe of knowledge is “forcefully removed” by colonization, our only recourse is through a memory not of linear record, but of sensuality, tactility, feeling, and heart. In this way, we build what is not only possible, but which memory tells us is precedented. Recorded via Zoom on May 25, 2020.

Cecilia Vicuña (1/7): Growing up with the Land

Cecilia Vicuña (2/7): Art and Climate: Erasing Our Forgetfulness

Cecilia Vicuña (3/7): Discovering Forgotten Histories

Cecilia Vicuña (4/7): Improvisation and Trust

Cecilia Vicuña (5/7): A Color that Doesn't Exist

The word “tamaas” in Arabic means “connection." Since 2004, Tamaas has worked transnationally among various artistic disciplines in the U.S., Morocco, and France. Through our new branch, Earth Arts Justice, comes Invitation to the Species, a podcast series in which we ask guest speakers to think about what their grandparents and parents’ ways of living bring to the present moment, and how their own work connects in specific ways to collective eco-systems and our climate. Invited guests respond through interviews, readings and performances.