MOCA’s Vicuña Exhibition Reveals Colonial Art Ecologies: Decolonizing Water, Memory, and Global Indigenous Resistance
Original framing: “The Museum of Contemporary, Los Angeles, presents Cecilia Vicuña's The Dream of Water: Quipu of Encounters Maricunga, an Inaugural Eric and Wendy Schmidt Environment and Art ...” — bing news
The exhibition centers Vicuña as a solo genius while erasing the *Mapuche weavers*, *Aymara salt harvesters*, and *Quechua textile artisans* whose techniques inform her practice. Chilean *campesinas* (peasant women) who preserve *quipu* traditions in remote villages are nowhere represented, despite their role as living repositories of this knowledge. MOCA’s press materials also omit Vicuña’s collaborations with *Afro-descendant* communities in Colombia, where she adapted *quipu* to document river poisonings by multinational mines. The museum’s silence on these partnerships reflects its pattern of platforming Indigenous artists only when their work can be repackaged for white audiences.
MOCA’s exhibition of *The Dream of Water* is a *microcosm of colonial extraction*—where Indigenous resistance is framed as ‘art,’ drained of its political and spiritual potency, and repackaged for elite consumption.
Vicuña’s *quipu* exposes the museum’s role as a *cultural colonizer*: it extracts Andean knowledge, presents it as apolitical, and then claims moral leadership in ‘environmental art.’ The work’s power lies in its *trickster* nature—it appears to celebrate MOCA’s greenwashing while secretly weaving a net of accountability, tying the museum to the very systems Vicuña critiques. To honor the piece, institutions must move beyond performative allyship: they must *divest* from extractive economies, *restore* Indigenous data sovereignty, and *reimagine* art as a tool for systemic disruption—not decoration. The *quipu*’s knots remind us that justice is not a single thread but a *braided* struggle, one that demands we unravel the lies of the museum and reweave the world anew.