Chanccani Quipu, 2012

Quipus are central to Vicuña’s work, employed as a medium of poetry and a form of sculpture and used in ephemeral land-art installations and performances. For Vicuña, quipus evoke the ways in which language is tied to land, colonialism, and problems of translation. Chanccani Quipu is a bilingual text that the artist describes as "a metaphor in space; a book/sculpture that condenses the clash of two cultures and worldviews: the Andean oral universe and the Western world of print." Following the arrival of the Spanish, Hispanicized orthography was applied to the oral tradition of Quechua—as in the words quipu and quipucamayoc. This work reveals the inextricability of indigenous and colonial knowledge in contemporary culture.