Cecilia Vicuña in Une brève histoire de fils
10 October 2024—16 January 2025
Group exhibition at Maison de l'Amérique latine, Paris, France
The Maison de l'Amérique latine is pleased to present the exhibition Une brève histoire de fils (A Brief History of Threads), which will be held in Paris from October 10, 2024 to January 16, 2025. Curated by exhibition curator Domitille d'Orgeval, it brings together 17 artists from Latin America, now recognised on the international scene, whose works, created between the 1960s and the present day, focus on thread, weaving, braiding and knotting.
These practices, rooted in vernacular traditions of Latin America, refer to distant memories, to archetypes that have shaped human experience across cultures and generations. Take the example of the Kogi Indians in Colombia for whom the thread, truly sanctified, “represents the magical union between the temporal and the spiritual, the instant and eternity, the human and the divine” (Manuel Hormaza). Also worthy of mention in Inca culture are the quipus or devices made of cords forming knots used to encode a multitude of information, ranging from agricultural statistics to historical accounts. Finally, in the Western imagination, the thread is at the heart of great mythological stories such as that of the Fates, Ariadne or Penelope, where it symbolises human destiny, the path to salvation and unfailing love.
Artists: Kenia Almaraz Murillo, Olga de Amaral, Milton Becerra, Inés Blumencweig, Iván Contreras Brunet, Elias Crespin, Jorge Eielson, Vanessa Enríquez, Sidival Fila, Gego, Martha Le Parc, Anna Maria Maiolino, Sandra Monterosso, Laura Sánchez Filomeno, Jesús Rafael Soto, Cecilia Vicuña, Natalia Villanueva Linares .