Knotless: Cecilia Vicuña's Vanished Glacier
For thousands of years, Andean communities tied knowledge into cord: harvests, histories, the movements of stars, all recorded in knotted fibre rather than written script. Cecilia Vicuña has spent decades reviving the ancient system of quipu communication as living art, and her latest work, unveiled this spring at Castello di Rivoli, strips the knots away entirely.
El glaciar ido (The vanished glacier) is Vicuña's first solo exhibition in an Italian museum, and her first major new commission for the Manica Lunga, the castle's long, sloping gallery. True to her practice, she works with raw, unprocessed wool, unwound and assembled into what she calls a quipu acostado, a horizontal quipu suspended along a gradual incline through the building. Seen from below, it is a sculptural system in motion, tracing the shape of something receding. That something, is ice.
Cecilia Vicuña working in the Manica Lunga, Castello di Rivoli Museo d'Arte Contemporanea. Photo: Alberto Nidola.
The Susa Valley, where the Castello stands, once sat beneath glaciers that have long since retreated. Vicuña's cords become a stand-in for that vanished water, an aerial architecture built from absence as much as material. Curator Marcella Beccaria points out that Vicuña's knots are missing on purpose, gesturing towards a slow erosion of memory and care for the world around us. The reference reaches further still, towards Chile's desaparecidos and the many people silenced by repressive regimes across the twentieth century, the fibre becoming a way of holding what history tries to erase.
Cecilia Vicuña, El glaciar ido (The vanished glacier / Il ghiacciaio scomparso), 2026. Installation view, Castello di Rivoli Museo d'Arte Contemporanea, Rivoli-Torino. Photo Sebastiano Pellion di Persano.
The exhibition folds in poetry, video, and sound, all elements she has worked with since the 1970s alongside her textile practice, plus newly written wall poems composed for the show. A forthcoming publication marks the first dedicated study of her research into glaciers specifically.
Documentation of the collective walks at Collina Morenica, Rivoli e / and Parco Alpi Cozie, Avigliana, 2026. Courtesy Castello di Rivoli Museo d'Arte Contemporanea, Rivoli-Torino. Photo: Alberto Nidola.
Distinctly, local residents were invited to take part in creating the work. Walks along the banks of the Dora Riparia river and the Avigliana Lakes initiated the gathering of debris and fragments. Students at Turin's Accademia Albertina di Belle Arti then transformed these findings into an ephemeral outdoor installation, extending Vicuña's lifelong interest in what she named Arte Precario back in the 1960s: art built from what is fragile, found, and freely given.
Cecilia Vicuña, El glaciar ido (The vanished glacier / Il ghiacciaio scomparso), 2026. Installation view, Castello di Rivoli Museo d'Arte Contemporanea, Rivoli-Torino. Photo Sebastiano Pellion di Persano.
Vicuña's path to this point has taken her from architecture school in Santiago to the Slade in London, from exile during Pinochet's coup to decades spent documenting Indigenous knowledge across the Amazon Basin. Her work now sits in the Tate and MoMA, and in 2022 she received the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the Venice Biennale, recognition of a practice built as much on activism as on aesthetics.
Vicuña first showed work at the Castello in 2000. Twenty-six years on, she returns with cord and wool standing in for glaciers that no longer exist, asking visitors to notice what has already slipped away.
. . .
Further Information:
El glaciar ido runs at Castello di Rivoli, Italy, until 20 September 2026.
. . .
Image Credits:
Lead: Cecilia Vicuña, El glaciar ido (The vanished glacier / Il ghiacciaio scomparso), 2026. Installation view, Castello di Rivoli Museo d'Arte Contemporanea, Rivoli-Torino. Photo: Sebastiano Pellion di Persano
All further images as credited in captions.