“Words are acts” is a phrase by Mexican poet Octavio Paz that Cecilia Vicuña often cites. Words as action. Words as change. Words as pulse. Words as political force. Words as tools for liberation. In her ongoing series Palabrarmas, or word-weapons, Vicuña combines words and images as a means of resistance, creating poetic fragments that playfully uncover new meanings hidden within. Poetry is an art form long marginalized by capitalist societies, but what happens when it is moved from the page into the street? What happens when its power is instrumentalized?

During Estallido Social—the Chilean social uprising that began in October 2019, resulting in a referendum to create a new constitution and ultimately paving the way for the election of a left-wing president in March 2022—young demonstrators revitalized some of the word-based protest signs invented by Chilean-born Vicuña in the 1970s. Reminiscent of the earlier social movement that elected President Salvador Allende in 1970, Estallido Social brought back the spirit of social unrest in a more expansive form, connected this time to global feminist and Indigenous movements. In this context, the embrace of Vicuña’s Palabrarmas by a broader sector makes perfect sense. Vicuña’s decades-long exploration of the intersection of language and images was ahead of its time, and the world is only just catching up.

An internationally acclaimed poet, Vicuña is known primarily in the field of visual arts for her quipus—immersive installations of enveloping skeins of wool that pay homage to the intricate system of knotted cords used by pre-Columbian cultures for accounting and record keeping—and her precarios—small, found object sculptures composed of natural elements and plastic debris. However, throughout most of her career, she has also continuously engaged with wordplay through what she calls Palabrarmas. The conjunction of the Spanish palabra, or word, in English, and arma, arm or weapon, gives Vicuña Palabrarmas, which she uses to open up words in order to reveal additional layers of complexity. For example, the Spanish word for truth, verdad, can be opened up by separating ver (to see) and dar (to give) so that truth transforms into giving sight.

The idea for Palabrarmas first presented itself to Vicuña as riddles in a spiritual vision when she was only seventeen years old. Since then, she has continued to expand on the concept, and her Palabrarmas have taken the form of collages, silkscreens, drawings, poems, fabric banners, cutouts, mixed-media installations, and street actions. Words reveal other words that lie within, altering the meanings in playful yet sophisticated ways. Truth becomes giving sight, and solidarity becomes giving sun. Because if you can open up words, as the artist likes to say, you can open up minds. To change language is also to change thinking itself, which is a power that comes with enormous political potential and promise.

An exploration of the potency of language appears in Vicuña’s poetry books, performances, films, and installations. In her poetry readings, she chants in Spanish, English, and dialects indigenous to Latin America, such as Quechua and Mapuche, alternating between languages in order to destroy the hegemony of English. Her 1980 documentary, What is Poetry to You?, poses the titular question to a cross section of residents of Bogotá, from mechanics to sex workers to university students, acknowledging the potential for words to reshape reality for everyone, not just the upper class. Discussing the significance of red menstrual blood as a feminist reclamation of matriarchal lineage in the artist book About to Happen, Vicuña emphasizes the word red hidden within other words, such as sacred, predicted, and mirrored. While wordplay seeps into much of her work, her Palabrarmas embody it most forcefully. Vicuña uses them to imagine new ways of seeing language.

This publication represents the first time a wide range of visual-spatial Palabrarmas have been brought together. It includes two insightful essays by scholars Mónica de la Torre and Carla Macchiavello as well as previously unpublished writing by Vicuña herself. De la Torre’s essay contextualizes the Palabrarmas within the political conditions of their genesis as well as within the artist’s fifty-year career. Emphasizing their role in sowing harmony during a tumultuous time, de la Torre explores the decolonization inherent in the dismantling of linguistic hierarchies. Macchiavello’s essay considers the Palabrarmas as an ongoing, dynamic, and ethical poetic project that has the potential to change our very ways of existing. She follows the trajectory of the series as it fits into Vicuña’s vibrant life as an activist and artist in London, Bogotá, and beyond. Vicuña’s own experimental writing in this publication offers a deeply personal, but also resolutely political, expression of her own feelings and intentions behind the Palabrarmas.

The core of this book is made up of nearly one hundred color images representing a wide range of Palabrarmas created between 1974 and 2020. Sketches taken from Vicuña’s archive give insight into her process of forming Palabrarmas from compound words. Cut-up paper Palabrarmas build on the legacy of collage as a way for artists to transform ordinary materials into politically charged artwork. The series AMAzone Palabrarmas is a set of twenty-eight drawings Vicuña created after a journey to the Amazon rain forest in 1978 that engages with her environmental activism: ama translates to love in English, making AMAzone into a love zone created in opposition to the destruction of the rain forest. Video stills document performances in Bogotá in the late 1970s and in New York City in 1981 that first brought the Palabrarmas into the charged atmosphere of urban streets. Fabric works nod to the feminist history of artists using traditional craft techniques in fine art but also demonstrate Vicuña’s unique ability to unite textile art and conceptualism, placing these deconstructed words in yet another formal sphere. Photographed in situ sixty miles from the US–Mexico border in Marfa, Texas, in 2020, a flag version of verdad takes on new meaning during the era of Trumpian propaganda and fake news. While the 1970s were her most prolific period for the Palabrarmas, Vicuña continues to make them and guide their meanings as they evolve through the present. If the Palabrarmas share a certain visual style, what unites them is their potential for transformation.

In addition to the images and new essays, this publication includes excerpts from historical reference texts, chosen together with the artist, that illustrate how different cultural contexts, traditions, and time periods have converted words into abstract forms of action. Writing in the early nineteenth century in Venezuela, as part of the liberation process of the Americas, Simón Rodríguez conceived a hybrid between a didactic essay and a form of visual poetry that creates a philosophical and typographical system to highlight the power of images in a sentence. Robert Randall writes about the “sacred language” and wordplays used by the Incans in the thirteenth to sixteenth centuries in what is now Peru, Bolivia, and Chile and its connection to both political and spiritual power. The French writer René Daumal, in Rasa, or, Knowledge of the Self (published in 1982, almost forty years after the author’s death), considers how language works in the ancient Vedic tradition in India. And the Brazilian pedagogical and political theorist Paulo Freire, in an excerpt from his seminal Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1968), posits that the essence of dialogue is the word and that to speak a true word is to transform the world, emphasizing the necessity of a profound love for the world and for people.

The urgent need for political engagement coupled with a resolute love for humanity is a rare combination. In 1973, in the face of despair both collective and personal, Vicuña invented a form of protest poetry whose impact spans generations and borders. In an essay written in November 2019, reflecting on Sabor a Mí, a book of Vicuña’s drawings and poems originally published in 1973, the artist writes, “The dream is now alive in the collective body that says: ‘Now that we’ve found each other, don’t let go.’”[1] Vicuña’s singular intertwining of words and images invents a new language that brings us together rather than tears us apart.

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[1] Cecilia Vicuña, “Beau Geste Press’s Sabor a mí,” in Beau Geste Press, ed. Alice Motard (Berlin: Bom Dia Boa Tarde Boa Noite; Bordeaux: CAPC, 2020), published in conjunction with an exhibition of the same name at Musée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux, Feb. 2–May 28, 2017.t goes here

“It is perfectly true that I, like many other women who work, especially as writers, was terrified of having children. I feared being fractured by the experience if not overwhelmed. I thought the quality of my writing would be considerably diminished by motherhood—that nothing that was good for my writing could come out of having children. [My mistakes were] in seeing The Child as my enemy rather than the racism and sexism of an oppressive capitalist society [and] believing none of the benefits of having a child would accrue to my writing.”

-       Alice Walker[1]

During my lunch hour, I hop on my electric bike, cruise from Potrero Hill to Bayview, and enter the spacious white rooms of Friends Indeed Gallery. A decade ago I would have spent an entire weekend visiting galleries, but now that I have two young children, I fit in art excursions whenever I can. Inside an eclectic group of representational paintings, photographs, and prints comprise the exhibition Mother and Child. While some of the works conjure the halcyon moments shared between contented parents and their young children, others express a more ambivalent, complicated view of mothers in our society.

Mothers, and pregnant people, in particular, are often the objects of public scrutiny, judged for their bodies and their professional decisions, expected to conform to archaic prescribed gender roles and assigned guilt for asserting their independence. As a (cis white) pregnant woman and new mother, I often felt supported and embraced by friends, acquaintances, and colleagues, but I also abruptly and unexpectedly encountered an array of antiquated prejudices.

“What? Wow, you’re the least maternal person I know.” This candid response to the quotidian news of my pregnancy emanated from a dishevelled musician friend turned straight-laced lawyer. Childless at the time, he’s now a father of two, but I doubt anyone has ever said to him, “Wow, you’re the least paternal person I know.” This early interaction marked the beginning of both a period of self-reflection and a forced reckoning with society’s opinions around what it means to be a mother.

Several works in Mother and Child conjure these jarring moments, but they also offer a defiant resistance to social norms that I find both bold and empowering. 

In Sasha Gordon’s Interloper (2021), the viewer looks up at a nude woman from just below her belly button—a startlingly intimate vantage point that clashes with the unruly, troubled expression on her face. The subject’s ample, unrestrained breasts dominate the center of the frame, and an exquisitely detailed, repulsive fly rests on her soft stomach. Gordon has spoken of her discomfort at the male gaze in the context of her identity as a queer, biracial Asian woman. While Interloper is not explicitly related to motherhood, the simultaneous objectification and unease concerning the female body reverberate.

As my first pregnancy progressed, it became clear to me that something about the physical act of bearing a child gave people the license to offer their unsolicited comments about my body. At an art opening, an acquaintance remarked, “Bold move, horizontal stripes,” looking at my black and white dress as though my growing stomach was something I should hide from the world, especially if I wanted to maintain my legitimacy as a professional person. I met a friend for coffee, solely, it seemed, so he could share his fears of his girlfriend’s body descending into ruin if she were to become pregnant with his child. I reacted angrily, telling him he needed to resist toxic beauty standards rooted in capitalist, colonialist, and patriarchal imperatives. After hearing the news of my recent pregnancy, an ex wrote me a string of texts detailing the demise of my body now that I’d chosen this path, as though this decision was somehow a personal affront to him. I didn’t dignify his missive with a response.

In the rare self-portrait The Beginning (2019), artist Deana Lawson appears candid and exposed, having given birth to her daughter Grace mere moments earlier. Still slick with amniotic fluid, the baby lying across her stomach looks alert—eyes wide open, arm up in the air. The mother’s expression is one of exhaustion, a man’s hand resting gently on her forehead. Lawson is known for her photographs depicting intimate moments in Black culture that appear documentary but are often staged. This composition also reveals elements of control: an artificial light source, the crisscrossing lines of the limbs, the decision to center the blue glove of a doctor or nurse. Ultimately, however, the raw, visceral strength of the birth aftermath cannot be orchestrated.[2] The photograph expresses a vulnerability that is the crux of a new mother’s bodily experience, at once powerful and messy.

When one of my coworkers wanted to express extreme disgust over text, she used the pregnant emoji. I felt like I should be offended, but I understood. When I was a few weeks pregnant with my second child, she said, “Aren’t you so glad you stopped at one?” “Hm,” I thought to myself, “now things really might get awkward.” However, she is an empathetic person at heart and set up an impressive lactation station for me in the industrial kitchen downstairs from our office. Apparently, HR’s idea was to install an inflatable room for privacy. Like a bouncy castle, except for pumping breastmilk at work. I was amused by the idea of discussing the editorial direction of a book upstairs in the office and then retreating downstairs to my own infantilizing, personal theme park.

Anne Buckwalter’s Madonna and Child (2021) depicts an ordinary, even quaint, domestic interior. Emphasizing pattern over depth, the painting is flat and colorful: grainy wood floorboards morph seamlessly into a white flower wallpaper, a pastel turquoise beret rests on a Quaker chair, a houseplant sits in a terracotta pot in the corner, a traditional portrait of Mary and Jesus hanging on the wall. Upon close inspection, one detail is jarring in its contrast to the rest of the scene—the flat screen perched on a simple wooden credenza is frozen on a still from a black-and-white porn movie. In the context of the exhibition, the painting suggests the disconnect between the orderly, chaste life of a romanticized maternal figure and the more realistic but perhaps concealed existence of a multifaceted woman.

For the first few years of motherhood, I subconsciously strived to keep my professional life and personal life neatly separate. I once picked up an artist from the airport late at night, and she looked puzzled, maybe even deceived, by the car seats in the back, “Do you have children?” she asked incredulously. I considered lying but instead nodded, which made her uncomfortable, and she quickly changed the subject.

Around this same time, I read The Argonauts, Maggie Nelson’s brilliant book on queer family-making, and one particular passage filled me with dread. Nelson details her memory of art historian Rosalind Krauss excoriating the scholar Jane Gallop for her work about being photographed as a mother by her husband. Nelson tells us that the “tacit undercurrent of [Krauss’s] argument… was that Gallop’s maternity had rotted her mind.”[3] I took several classes with Krauss in grad school, and I remember vividly her infamous derision, but also her status as the paragon of intellectual success. Krauss’s contempt for the entanglement of motherhood and art evident in Nelson’s anecdote exemplifies the erroneous yet apparently still extant stereotype that working in a creative field and parenting are fundamentally incompatible.

In Sanya Kantarovsky’s Vasilia (2021), a stylized portrait of a mother and young child in profile makes literal the inevitable intertwining of the pair. The woman’s head tilts downward toward the child, whose eyes are shut in repose. Her mother’s slight frown and expressive eyebrows suggest a conflicted but resigned attachment to the child. Stray strands of the brown-haired bun on top of the woman’s head fall forward, seeming to disappear into her child’s forehead, whose hair is, in turn, vanishing upward into her mother’s mouth, acting as an extension of the umbilical cord in the womb. With grim humor, the double portrait alludes to the existential angst of the mother constantly tethered to her child.

It took time for me to become more comfortable with my dual role as a mother and arts worker and allow my resistance to their integration fade. I found ways to incorporate my children into my professional life, bringing them to galleries and museums and letting them listen in on lectures. It turned out they were eager to engage with this less familiar side of their mother, and I was happy to share it. In fact, recently, both my children declared they want to be artists when they grow up, which makes me trepidatious but also a little pleased. One afternoon my four-year-old put a piece of his snack and a rainbow paperclip in a 2” x 2” clear plastic cube, scribbled a tiny label, and said, “this is art.” Not long ago, my daughter carefully selected a flamboyant, mismatched outfit and arrived with her father at an exhibition opening at the gallery where I work. She was immediately handed a chicken skewer by one of the catering staff, as she stared in awe at the wall-sized videos. She looked up at me, mouth agape, and said, “You eat chicken and watch movies at work?”

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[1] “One Child of One’s Own: A Meaningful Digression within the Work(s)” from In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose (Harcourt Press: San Diego, 1976), Note: Walker also emphasizes the importance of having only one child in maintaining a meaningful creative career. I respectfully disagree with this distinction!

[2] Looking at this photograph, I also think about, and want to call attention to, the devastating statistic that the maternal mortality rate for Black mothers is four times that of white mothers in the U.S., but that discussion is for another essay.

[3] Maggie Nelson, The Argonauts (Graywolf Press: Minneapolis, MN), 41.