Cecilia Vicuña has spent decades transforming museums into gathering places for ritual, witness and collective remembrance. Her new exhibition at MOCA Grand Avenue, opening November 15, demonstrates how contemporary art can address ecological catastrophe without feeling didactic.
"The Dream of Water: Quipu of Encounters Maricunga" is one of two inaugural exhibitions under the Eric and Wendy Schmidt Environment and Art Prize. Vicuña, a poet and artist, has transformed the quipu—an ancient Andean knotted communication system used by pre-Columbian empires to send messages across vast territories—into something urgent and alive.
The quipu historically held knowledge, memory and administrative records. Vicuña sees deeper meaning in the knots: a language of interconnection suggesting that everything is tied together—water to land, past to present, the Atacama Desert to Los Angeles.
For this exhibition, Vicuña focused on the Maricunga Salt Flats in Chile's Atacama region, sacred territory for the Colla Indigenous community whose ancestors have tended these landscapes for generations. The region sustains rare microorganisms, provides habitat for Andean flamingos and holds austere beauty. Corporate lithium mining, however, is transforming it into a resource extraction site. Lithium mining requires enormous quantities of water, and the Atacama is one of Earth's driest places.
Vicuña's response begins with "Parina Quipu" (2026), a monumental sculpture suspended in the museum's tallest gallery. Walls of unspun wool, sheared by Southern Chilean artisans and dyed in vivid pink—colors echoing the flamingos struggling to survive in their shrinking habitat—are woven with threads of yellow, green, orange, purple and gray, creating a chromatic map of biodiversity under siege.
The centerpiece is a five-channel video installation, "Salar de Maricunga Quipu de Encuentro" (2026). Vicuña traveled to the salt flats in December 2025 and May 2026, filming from dusk to dawn. The videos function as documentary meditation: footage of microorganisms, vast salt formations, adapted species and ritual. Vicuña and collaborators—scientists, artists, filmmakers, water activists and Colla community members—performed ceremonies documented in the installation.
British musician Cosmo Sheldrake composed "Canto de Maricunga" (2026) for the exhibition. Rather than a soundtrack, it functions as a canto—a song, chant and poem in sound. Sheldrake wove together underwater recordings, cosmic radio waves, field recordings from rituals and contributions from La Chimuchina, a Chilean ensemble playing ancestral Andean instruments. Vicuña's voice and voices from all ceremony participants move through the composition.
José Luis Blondet, MOCA's senior curator, notes Vicuña's artistic evolution: "As a poet, Vicuña is less concerned with the quipu's archaeological dimension than with its endless metaphorical power." Her first quipu, from the early 1960s, was a journal entry titled "El quipu que no recuerda nada"—The quipu that remembers nothing—exploring the paradox of how to hold onto what is being erased.
The exhibition reflects Vicuña's commitment to a transnational, interconnected vision of environmental struggle. In spring 2027, Vicuña will host a "quipu of encounters" at MOCA, bringing together artists, activists, scientists and water defenders from across the Los Angeles basin. Los Angeles' water crisis will meet Chile's in a ritual exchange creating what she calls a "Living Quipu." Similar gatherings have occurred at glaciers in Chile, the Guggenheim in New York, Tate Modern in London and museums across South America, as part of a practice refusing to separate art from activism or aesthetics from ethics.
Clara Kim, MOCA's chief curator, said: "Cecilia Vicuña is one of the most extraordinary and powerful voices working at the intersection of contemporary art, the environment and indigenous cultures. Her practice has turned the ancient quipu, a knotted record, into a living act of listening."
"The Dream of Water" runs through June 6, 2027.
