‘‘touch in transit’’: Manifestation / Manifestacio ´n in Cecilia Vicun ˜ a’s cloud-net JULIE PHILLIPS BROWN Abstract With poems typeset in string-like arrangements, Cecilia Vicun ˜a’s cloud-net connects the poetic line with large-scale gallery installations of white woolen skeins. Together the poems and installations weave a textual and material web, incorporating not only different media, but also languages, feminine and domestic craft, history and fate, the World Wide Web, social networking, globalization, memory, and a mindfulness for the present. Vicun ˜a’s merging of verse, lyric, song, dance, sculpture, performance, and installation, comes in response to a world overwhelmed by the effects of globalization and ecological deterioration. As Vicun ˜a and her readers touch and move their bodies among cloud-net’s webs, they open a shared transitive space, reclaiming the original energy of universal genesis, and its potential to heal the destruction wrought since then. I am a mixed person, a person of two cultures... . I use everything because I want to ask them all to remember. I write, I sing, I weave at the same time, because I’m at the moment of emergency, at the moment of danger, when you actually feel that all of this could go away. Life itself could go away. The web can disappear. So I work on that edge. Cecilia Vicun ˜a, cloud-net (20) In an oeuvre spanning over forty years, Chilean poet and artist Cecilia Vicun ˜ a has lived and worked in continual translation between languages, cultures, and media. Born in Santiago, Chile, in 1948, Vicun ˜a produced her first two- and three-dimensional artworks in the mid-1960s. She later left to study in London, where she remained in exile following Pinochet’s military coup in 1973. Since 1980, Vicun ˜a has lived in New Contemporary Women’s Writing 5:3 November 2011. doi:10.1093/cww/vpr012 ª The Author 2011. Published by Oxford University Press; all rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com 208 at Virginia Military Institute on June 19, 2015 http://cww.oxfordjournals.org/ Downloaded from