Whitechapel GalleryWhitechapel
Cecilia Vicuña: Foraging Quipu
A free participatory installation in Gallery 4, running alongside Cecilia Vicuña: Living Threads. Visitors contribute to a collective quipu, the Andean knotted-cord form central to Vicuña's practice.
More in London
The material in this room was collected by local people. For the London version, Cecilia Vicuña put out an open call for dry plant matter and lightweight debris gathered from everyday surroundings, then wove the contributions into one suspended quipu, after the Andean system of knotted cords used to keep records.
You walk into Gallery 4 at the end of Living Threads, her ticketed survey, but this room is free. Branches, seeds, roots, fungi, textiles, scraps of wood and plastic hang together in it. The piece was first made at IMMA in Dublin in 2025, where The Liberty found twigs, feathers and pinecones on wire so thin they seemed to float. Plastics are on the materials list, so for once the debris Londoners step over is the art.
It is one installation in one room, a free coda to Living Threads or a short stop on its own. Open Tuesday to Sunday, 11am to 6pm, until 9pm on Thursdays.
Look for
Fungi strung beside plastic
Look for seeds, roots and fungi hanging alongside textiles, wood fragments and plastics, all gathered by local contributors and woven into a single suspended quipu.
Good for
- An Hour Or Less
- Cheap Culture
- Evening Visits
Skip if
You want Vicuña's paintings and archives: those are in the ticketed Living Threads, not this room.
Also at Whitechapel Gallery
On now nearby
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Image credits
6
- Yuko Mohri: In ConcertCourtesy of Barbican Centre
- Robert Ryman: The Real ThingCourtesy of Barbican Centre
- RootsCourtesy of The Photographers' Gallery
- Whitechapel GalleryGrindtXX / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0
- Tower of LondonBob Collowan / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0
- Barbican CentreJulian Herzog / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0