PANEL 9: Word Threads

With Cecilia Vicuña, Júlia de Carvalho Hansen and Leonardo Froés

Host: Ludmilla Lis is a writer and holds an M.A. in ethnic-racial studies

In the 1970s, poet Leonardo Fróes from Rio moved to a small farm outside Petrópolis, where he dedicated himself to cultivation, deepening his understanding of plants and writing poems related to environmental issues, as well as to excessively human problems, as can be seen in his Poesia Reunida [Collected Poems]. The same interest in plants and animals is present in the work of younger poet Júlia de Carvalho Hansen, who has published books as Romã [Pomegranate] and Seiva, veneno ou fruto [Sap, Poison or Fruit]. In this panel, the Brazilian writers meet Cecilia Vicuña, a Chilean artist and poet who has turned her work into a fighting platform, to defend human rights and inform on environmental destruction. Her work won the Velázquez Prize and was exhibited in the most recent documenta in Kassel. One of her approaches is inspired by the Andean quipus, objects made with threads and knots used for accounting and storytelling. The trio will help relocate the anthropocentrism that relegates non-human living beings, particularly plants, to the background. In this sense, the “word thread” (an expression by filmmaker and Guarani leader Carlos Papá) of poetry intertwines with the threads of the artist’s installations, in a tangle that also refers to the vines and lianas in forests. A verbal-vegetable fabric shapes up to look after planetary health.