8.30.2022
"As part of her Guggenheim retrospective, Vicuña conceived a ceremony for the healing of earth, inviting visitors to become active in the poetic and political change of our world. Throughout the performance, the artist will lead audience and performers in collective gestures of weaving, chant, and prayer.
As a performer you will be responsible for:
· Carrying a rolled bundle of raw wool (approximately 10-15 lbs) up the museum ramps
· Unfurling the wool bundle from Ramp 5 of the museum's rotunda towards the audience below
· Walking with the artist in an outdoor procession (approximately one mile), carrying wool with other volunteers.
· Joining the artist on a chartered boat and following her direction to make a ceremonial offering of the wool material to the ocean."
The living waters of New York Harbor were the sculptresses and the diviners of this ritual. The story the waters told upon meeting the 28, 40-foot long strips of wool (biodegradable & naturally dyed) were stories of spiral, folding and unfolding, leading and following, sea creature being born, and creature breaking apart. The backdrops were the bridge, the oil rig, the ocean, and the city. The colors of the oil rig and the colors of the wool blended together; oil meets water and wool is an offering, a co-habitation, and an intervention of strange material into the water's body. The waters are an intelligence; the wool revealed the field of energy around them as a dynamic and evolving sea creature on the move. We watched until it vanished into the deep blue twilight.
-KPrevallet