A new cut of Kon Kon, (2012, 60 mins), will be screened, followed by a conversation between Cecilia Vicuña & Jonathan Skinner. In this documentary poem, poet and artist Cecilia Vicuña returns to Con Cón beach, the birthplace of her art in Chile, where the sea is dying and an ancient tradition is being wiped out. Con Cón, facing Aconcagua, the tallest mountain in the Western hemisphere, has a cultural heritage going back thousands of years. Over centuries, the “sonido rajado”, a powerful and unique sound, emerged. Revisiting the site, she explores the connections between her own art and the ancient music and oral traditions, while witnessing the ecological and cultural destruction of place.

Cecilia Vicuña’s works have for some forty years gravitated between the written word, in multiple languages and visual media, involving, “earth-works,” installation, a great deal of art made with thread and fabric, drawing and painting, printed works and book arts, film and video, and live intermedia performance. Among recent publications, she coedited The Oxford Book of Latin American Poetry, surveying 500 years of multi-lingual work, presented in original languages with translations into English. 

Jonathan Skinner’s poetry collections include Birds of Tifft (BlazeVOX, 2011) and Political Cactus Poems (Palm Press, 2005). He founded and edits the journal ecopoetics (www.ecopoetics.org), which features creative-critical intersections between writing and ecology. Currently a Fellow with the Cornell Society for the Humanities, Skinner also writes ecocriticism on contemporary poetry and poetics.