Piano QUI-Poem Performance by Cecilia Vicuña and Ricardo Gallo

Poetry, piano, flutes, and synthesizer come together in a performance that will never happen the same way twice. Renowned artist Cecilia Vicuña and pianist Ricardo Gallo bring Vicuña’s poems to life, building a sonic and poetic world in real time.

Presented as part of Spatial Poems, this edition of QUI-Poem responds in verse and sound to the room, the moment, and the artworks on view. Vicuña and Gallo have performed together since 2016. Vicuña’s voice, charged with echoes of Indigenous chants and contemporary wit, meets Gallo’s distinctive piano touch, expanded by inside-piano preparation, traditional South American flutes, and synthesizer. Their Spanish and English poetry draws on ancient Andean knowledge and connects it to today’s environmental crisis. Their collaborations also include Vicuña’s Tate Modern commission, Brain Forest Quipu.

Join us after the performance for a reception in the Research and Development Store. Signed copies of Vicuña and Gallo’s new album will be available for purchase.

Spatial Poems is a communal exhibition in three concurrent parts that aims to disrupt the art world’s usual curatorial structures. Cecilia Vicuña’s “precarios”—sculptures made from debris and collective rituals of dissonant sound—serve as the conceptual framework for three interrelated projects: Vicuña’s union of three, Lola Ayisha Ogbara’s Scars Insist on Being Remembered, and Sam Frésquez’s nested, dreamlike kitchens. Together, the artists explore ephemerality, memory, and cyclical repetition. The projects can be read as a score, or spatial poem, that inspires a dialogue on care and new forms of being.

Cecilia Vicuña is a poet, artist, activist, and filmmaker whose work addresses ecological destruction, human rights, and cultural homogenization. Born in Santiago de Chile and in exile since the early 1970s after the military coup against President Salvador Allende, she is the author of more than 30 volumes of art and poetry and winner of Chile’s 2023 Premio Nacional de Artes Plásticas.

Colombian pianist and composer Ricardo Gallo has written for acoustic and electro-acoustic ensembles, film, dance, installations, and multimedia stage productions, and has published sixteen albums as a leader or co-leader. He has received commissions from the Colombia National Symphony Orchestra and Big Band Bogotá. Since 2016, he has performed as a duo with poet and artist Cecilia Vicuña, directing the sonic component of her 2022 Tate Modern Turbine Hall commission, Brain Forest Quipu. A MacDowell fellow, he is based in New York.