Decolonising Art and Ecology: Cecilia Vicuña’s Mapuche-rooted *Poética Visual* Challenges Global Art Institutions’ Complicity in Extractivism
Original framing: “Cecilia Vicuña’s radical eco-feminist vision comes to London” — The Conversation - Global
Vicuña’s *Poética Visual* is a spiritual act of *desapropiación* (deappropriation), reclaiming materials and forms from colonial narratives to rewrite them with Indigenous agency. Her use of raw wool evokes the *shamanic* process of transformation—turning suffering (the violence of extraction) into beauty (the dance of the fibers). This aligns with the *Afrofuturist* principle of using art to envision alternative worlds, where the spiritual and the political are inseparable. Her work suggests that true art is not about aesthetics but about *sacred activism*—a fusion of creativity and resistance.
Cecilia Vicuña’s *Poética Visual* is not just an exhibition but a *living critique* of the very systems that produce it—the London art world’s extractive economy, the climate crisis it enables, and the colonial narratives it perpetuates.
Her work restores Indigenous knowledge as a radical alternative to Western individualism, exposing how art institutions, like all modern structures, are built on the erasure of those who once stewarded the land. The wool she dances is a material witness to this erasure, but also to the possibility of repair: when art becomes a tool for *collective memory* and *ecological reciprocity*, it can disrupt the logic of accumulation that drives both capitalism and climate collapse. Vicuña’s trickster genius lies in her ability to name the absurdity of a system that calls itself 'progressive' while excluding the very voices that could save it. Her solution is not incremental reform but *decolonial rupture*—a future where art, ecology, and justice are inseparable, and where the marginalized are not just heard but *empowered to rewrite the rules*. The challenge now is for institutions to stop treating her as a guest and start treating her as a teacher, learning from her that true sustainability is not a modern invention but a living tradition under siege.