Re-visioning the Archive: Cecilia Vicuña’s Permanent Impermanence

This essay examines ‘permanent impermanence’ as a key aesthetic to the work of Chilean poet and artist Cecilia Vicuña. It traces Vicuña’s persistent making, unmaking, and remaking of what she has termed her arte precario from the 1960s to the present to consider her practice of re-versioning as a form of radical archivism, informed by socialist, Indigenous practices of community and care. Underpinning the essay are two animating concepts: metaphor, brought back to its root meaning of carrying over; and collectivity, understood through Cristina Rivera Garza’s work as the bringing together of objects, bodies, and communities in opposition to capitalist individualism. The essay explores how Vicuña builds an alternative narrativization of history by accreting a disappearing, reappearing, collective archive of work in which ephemerality and vulnerability insist as powerful forces. It argues for the aesthetics of permanent impermanence as a theory of how art (whether literary, visual, or performance art, and importantly, as the fluid transfiguration and mediation between these forms) can both respond to and re-vision a world increasingly patterned by the throwaway culture of late capitalism, and by the ongoing histories of colonial, imperial violence.