Catastrophe creates fragments that oppose it. Chilean poet, painter, and activist Cecilia Vicuña’s lifelong artistic practice is dedicated to this idea. Her work is grounded in the belief that objects and detritus cast aside by the movement of history may be made into bearers of transformative potential. Vicuña’s first book, Saborami, insists on the capacity for a “touched object” to become a “charged object.” That is, on the capacity for a collective political and aesthetic imagination to make insignificant, precarious, and fragile objects into bearers of transformative potential. First published in 1973 in a small print run from Beau Geste Press, Saborami was put together while Vicuña lived in London, first as a student at the Slade and then, following the overthrow of Salvador Allende’s socialist government by Pinochet’s CIA-backed military coup, as a political exile. The book functions both as a chronicle of the years of Vicuña’s artistic development during which she committed herself and her art to Allende’s socialist vision, and as an urgent response to the military takeover in her country, an event that she understood as “a total, radical, and absolute erasure of everything.” The original print run of Saborami responded to this erasure by turning ephemerality, contingency, and the potential to be wiped out into a lever through which to prize open a gap in the false permanence of Pinochet’s regime. The book remains a vibrant repudiation of the world of free-market abstraction and concrete murder that the coup inaugurated.
The 2024 printing of Saborami by London’s Book Works is the first full facsimile edition to appear outside of Chile. It is edited by Amy Tobin and Luke Roberts, both of whom have afforded Vicuña’s work significant space in their own respective histories of postwar art and poetry. The editors’ introduction contextualizes the work and details Vicuña’s wider activism in internationalist artistic and political movements. An appendix provides essays and talks in which Vicuña reflects on the devastation wrought by Pinochet and his generals, on her own creative process, and on the collaborative methods through which the book was originally printed and distributed. Along with these texts, Tobin and Roberts include full-color reproductions of paintings that appear as monochrome photographs within the book proper, as well one painting, The Death of Allende, which does not appear, but which is described in detail in the 1973 text. It is to the deep credit of the editors that the 2024 edition of Saborami retains a sense of the singular power of the original while containing enough historical scaffolding to make this power accessible fifty years after the events to which it responds.
This is a book with an extraordinary capacity to invigorate and inspire, and writing about it means reckoning with where this power comes from. One possible answer, I think, lies in the work’s singular relationship to its historical circumstances, and therefore to history per se: Saborami was produced in the immediate wake of devastation, and it carries this within each of its pages. The book proper begins with a series of collages and texts, a “journal of objects for the Chilean resistance,” which forms Vicuña’s immediate response to the events of September 1973. From here, the chronology moves backwards, albeit with frequent mentions of the present moment of its production. After the journal, there is the “Brown Book.” Composed in June of the same year, this section acts as a tribute to life under Allende and an attempt to express through found photographs and cosmological speculation the sense of extraordinary possibility that suffused Chile during this time. After this, one reads a diary of the formation and reception of a piece entitled Otoño (Autumn) displayed in the National Museum of Fine Arts in Santiago, followed by reflections on Vicuña’s work as a painter alongside reproductions of, amongst others, her series “Heroes of the Revolution.” Saborami ends with a sequence of poetry written two years before Vicuña’s move to London. Arranging this work in reverse order of its composition means that Vicuña’s ecstatic tributes to a—now lost—collective life are necessarily mediated by a sense of profound loss and rage. The short, original introduction by one of the editors at Beau Geste, Philipe Ehrenberg—who was himself living in exile in England following Mexico’s 1968 Tlatelolco massacre—informs us that the book was “planned as a celebration” and that, following September 11, 1973, it became something that “symbolizes the contained fury and the sorrow of Chile’s present.” The coup transfigured an artist’s book planned by friends into a collective project to save and protect. This salvage mission was not conducted for the sake of one artist’s work. Rather, Saborami was conceived—and still reads—as a vessel through which a collective horizon that was the dominant condition of possibility of Vicuña’s art might endure.
The book’s split temporality is felt immediately in the journal of objects. We read that upon hearing of the first attempted coup of June 1973, Vicuña “decided to make an object everyday [sic] in support of the Chilean revolutionary process” and that following Allende’s overthrow, she conceived of the objects as “intended to support armed struggle against the reactionary government.” In one sense, the photographs, collages, and bilingual text that constitute the journal present a subjective correlate to processes of collective social transformation; they express the mixture of subjectivation and self-abandon that characterizes a shared remaking of the world: “As industries are nationalized, I am nationalized. From individual to communal property.” Against the backdrop of what Vicuña felt as the “horrendous grayness and sadness of the British Soul,” her home country takes on an impossibly vibrant Chile could be the first happy country in the world, a way of being constantly affectionate would grow from innocence and neolithic ecstasy, (reappearing). Suicide wouldn’t exist. Socialism would achieve a cosmic consciousness, the sum of the wisdom of the pre-Columbian Indians and of the many wisdoms of other places.”
A prefigurative experience of actual utopia dissolves so-called “social facts,” and tectonic shifts in the present radiate backwards, summoning alternative, ancient epistemologies without smothering them. This sensitivity does not, however, prevent Vicuña from assuming a register of authority: “Invent your task, do it!” she insists with an indignant joy in a text block dedicated to the role of cultural workers in the struggle.
For all its investment in happiness and sensuous experience, Saborami is not naive about its enemies. The journal’s enthusiasm turns to cold rage when it comes to the “mummie,” a term for the small-minded spokespeople of property who must be eliminated if Allende’s socialism is to endure. One page consists of four dolls representing this type dangling from nooses. At the bottom we read a handwritten quote from Mao that describes the necessity of eliminating reactionaries as a broom sweeps away dust. In a book whose images are warm, fantastical, and enthused in spite of their monochrome reproduction, this coldness is an articulation of the rational element necessary for effective class warfare. As a whole, the journal of objects consistently affirms the clarity of the opaque and the beauty of the coarse, and in doing so it enacts a synthesis at the level of the aesthetic that is repeated in statements of praxis. “Revolutionary violence,” writes Vicuña in one entry, “is a nail hammered on a banana leaf. A rough movement to capture the delicate, an [sic] haiku or a leap of Tai Chi.” Friedrick Hayek reportedly responded to the news of Pinochet’s repressions by stating that there are moments when “democracy needs a good cleaning.” Vicuña’s objects exist against this brutality: they are dirty and quick monuments persisting in opposition to an infernal machine of sterility and disappearance.
A major part of Saborami is dedicated to Vicuña’s paintings. Several of her works are reproduced in monochrome within the facsimile section and in vibrant color as part of the appendix to the 2024 edition. They include her well-known rendering of Marx looking pensive amongst sensuous copulating bodies, her portrait of folk singer and organizer Violeta Parra, and her painting of Lenin with his hands in his pockets declaring via a luxurious red speech bubble that the freedom of the proletariat can never be complete without the freedom of women. Vicuña’s openly acknowledged debt to Leonara Carrington is evident in this work. A particular blending of the wonderful and the sensuous into and out of the historical, however, is all her own. This relationship to history is complex. Vicuña’s rendition of the 1971 meeting between Allende and Fidel Castro expresses a cosmological innocence that stems from the presumed inevitability of their shared project. Castro, we read in the accompanying text, is represented as a “New Man” and Allende is wrapped “in the charismatic veil that descends on all historic characters.” Actual events, however, intrude on felicitous teleologies. It was, after all, this meeting where the Cuban leader advised his comrade to prepare for an armed struggle against fascism, and where the latter insisted that Chile must remain on its peaceful, democratic path towards socialism. In a world after the coup, the butterfly that has “mistaken Allende for a flower” is expressive of a terminally naive vulnerability. To look at the painting now is to experience these qualities simultaneously, and to see the communist horizon under whose influence Vicuña created the work persist within and against its foreclosure. Politics is in this art like water in water.
Each moment of Saborami moves back and forth between two sides of a ruptured continuum. The book stems from the time after the coup; the repudiation of the event is its stated purpose. At the same time, its aim is precisely to transmit an energy that stems from the beauties and sufferings of collective modes of life that preexisted the Pinochet regime. In other words, it is a book of a time after because it is emphatically a book of the time before. At points, these temporalities press against each other, creating an urgency that is itself a mode of preservation: “I didn’t want to make it with many words, since there is hardly any time left to live” writes Vicuña at the start of the journal of objects. This sense of limited time was optimistic: the systematic torture necessary for Milton Friedman’s Chicago Boys to begin their economic vivisections was well underway when Beau Geste published the initial print run. Part of the magic of Saborami is its capacity to turn desperation into a mode through which the political and aesthetic possibilities to which Vicuña dedicated her life endure at the moment of their suffocation. In an unsent letter to their contemporaries at GAAG (Guerilla Art Action Group), Ehrenberg and Vicuña describe what had happened in Chile as “the ruthlessly [sic] decapitation of a newborn babe … the killing of 5 million people creating, thinking, and gathering in a new, joyful, unheard way.” If the coup is a decapitation, we could perhaps understand Saborami as existing in the hypothetical instant between the severing of the head and the dying of the mind. Allende’s Chile was not to be saved, and the life-defining collective experiences birthed therein were largely repressed. Still, the capacity to inspire and invigorate that runs throughout Saborami is itself a sign that transformative possibility has been preserved at the precise moment of the disappearance of its realization. The book is a flame trapped in amber.
As a work of salvage, Saborami is completely uninterested in resolving its own contradictions. Its politics are fast and enthusiastic, its poetry is erotic and sometimes rough, and its thinking is as sharp-edged and unrefined as the moment of its composition demands. The translations into English from the original Spanish are often hasty, and an elementary knowledge of the latter is enough to know that certain passages have been smoothed over or left untranslated. Like an effective guerilla fighter, however, the book weaponizes its own imperfections and the contingencies of its circumstances as a force against the false necessity of military-backed market domination: “Maximum fragility against maximum power,” as Vicuña has put it elsewhere. One assumes that an intuitive understanding of the need to preserve these elements guided Tobin and Roberts in their decision to print a facsimile edition, even as they point out that this involves a necessary flattening of the microscopic idiosyncrasies, inserts, and accidents that made each of the individual two hundred and fifty Beau Geste copies unique. What we have now is a mediated, composite object, one which necessarily smooths out a modicum of the sharp edges of the original. Rather than a reprint, it might be worth understanding the 2024 Saborami as a dynamic echo of what was already a series of echoes and inscriptions whereby an artist attempted to inscribe the communal transformations and devastations of her moment.
Speaking in 1974, Vicuña stated that “paradise is one of my concerns … But all this dreamlike life depended on the triumph of revolution, really. You can never have individual joy unless you have social joy, I mean joy everywhere.” There is a sense of bitter melancholy here, as if her art has misfired and become trapped at the moment of its realization. Still, this bitterness is itself a product of joy, of a happiness that has become frozen over and deferred, and it is through the reclaiming of the collective horizon to which Vicuña’s art still speaks that this feeling can be requickened into its former shape. As she put it more recently, it is “of the utmost urgency to recover the memory of the lost dream.” Saborami continues to encrypt and transmit this memory and this dream. The stakes of its recovery have hardly been higher.