IMMA invites Dr Catherine Gander academic and poet (Associate Professor of American Literature, Dept. of English. Maynooth University, Ireland) to present a talk in response to the exhibition, Cecilia Vicuña: Reverse Migration, a Poetic Journey.

In this lecture and response, writer and scholar Dr Catherine Gander considers how Cecilia Vicuña’s lifetime of socially oriented art builds an alternative historical archive – one that presents a collective, anticolonial telling of humanity’s story on our shared planet.

In 1980, poet and artist Cecilia Vicuña took a microphone and video camera among the streets of Bogotá, Colombia, asking the people she met “Qué es para usted la poesía?” – “What is poetry to you?.”  A young policeman provides one of many astonishingly insightful responses: “I categorise poetry as a second telling, or as a historical event.” His answer provides the starting point for this lecture. Guided by Ursula K. Le Guin’s Carrier Bag Theory of human evolution, which resituates the origin of human technology as a cultural carrier bag rather than a weapon of control, this lecture explores art’s capacity to undo colonial narratives of dominance, and to offer another, more collective and relational history in its place.

Dr Catherine Gander (Associate Professor of American Literature, Dept. of English. Maynooth University, Ireland) is an academic and poet. This talk extends on Gander’s research essay Re-visioning the Archive: Cecilia Vicuña’s Permanent Impermanence‘ (Open Library of the Humanities Journal, 11:1 2025); that examines ‘permanent impermanence’ as a key aesthetic to the work of Chilean poet and artist Cecilia Vicuña. It traces Vicuña’s persistent making, unmaking, and remaking of what she has termed her arte precario from the 1960s to the present to consider her practice of re-versioning as a form of radical archivism, informed by socialist, Indigenous practices of community and care.