Beyond numerical values, a quipu can hold “the watercourses of the Andes, or the connections between land and sky,” said curator Laura Copelin. In Vicuña’s interpretation, the quipu encompasses far more than its utilitarian function.
But the rest look nothing like historical quipus. One of the pieces in the Sonoran Quipu fashions a traditional quipu form out of Sonoran materials, threading chile seed pods on strings of different lengths and hanging them from a long smooth tree branch.
Such quipus can include just a few strands, or thousands they can be color-coded, or not. In Quechua, the language of many of the ethnic groups Indigenous to Andean South America - the area that stretches from what is now southern Colombia to Chile and northern Argentina, encompassing much of Peru, Bolivia, and Ecuador - the word “quipu” means “knot” or “to knot.” It also refers to an ancient record-keeping device: Instead of using written ledgers, Andean societies made knots on fiber cords to keep track of numeric information, such as tax, census, or calendar records. Sonoran Quipu is the latest in Vicuña’s decades-long exploration of the quipu as a form, dating back to the blue thread in her bedroom. Over the course of a week in January, Vicuña fashioned the donated material into Sonoran Quipu. The installation fills the main hall of the MOCA, an expansive concrete space that was originally a fire station, with sculptures fashioned out of those found objects. They circulated a set of “responsible collecting guidelines” and set up folding tables that were soon piled high with everything from tumbleweeds to broken toys. In late 2022, MOCA invited members of the Tucson community to contribute “detritus” to the installation. Vicuña’s Sonoran Quipu, on view at Tucson’s Museum of Contemporary Art, has this effect on the landscape of southern Arizona’s Sonoran Desert. Using the thread to draw together the elements of her room in new ways, Vicuña rearranged and reconstituted the significance of the space she inhabited, allowing it to connect to a belief system that could transcend her earthy surroundings. taut and geometrical as a sky to communicate with other worlds,” she wrote in her Stupid Diary.
“Tired of my room’s normality I have criss-crossed it with a blue thread. In 1972, the artist and poet Cecilia Vicuña strung blue yarn around her bedroom in the coastal city of Con Cón, Chile.
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