Cecilia Vicuña: ‘Democracy allowed a teenager like me to be free. When that was removed, it was like the end of the world’

It was 1973, and Cecilia Vicuña was in London, on a scholarship at Slade School of Fine Art, when the news broke. A CIA-backed military coup had overthrown the government in her native Chile, ousting Salvador Allende’s democratically elected socialist administration and bringing General Augusto Pinochet to power.

Information came through to the young artist slowly, in painful pieces. Her father had lost his job, a former classmate had been tortured, her uncle became one of the more than 1,000 disappeared. Paintings were lost, murals painted over, books burned.

“If we are to be made into litter and castoffs, then fine,” she would write to a friend some years later. “I am garbage and a castoff, and that is my language – the exploded fragment.”

Half a century on, gatherings of garbage and other fragments are made hauntingly extraordinary in the halls of the Irish Museum of Modern Art, in Dublin. Loss lingers, mingled with flashes of brave joy.

There are nubs of spent pencils, twigs, seeds, fabric scraps, a huge hanging of native Irish wool, pieces of poetry, paintings, film and the sound of the artist’s unique voice mingled with bird song. Collectively it feels analogous with Vicuña’s own realisation, 50 years ago, that there is always hope; that within the small, the forgotten, lie the seeds of change. In 1974 she cofounded Artists for Democracy and held a solo show, Precarios: A Journal of Objects for the Chilean Resistance, in London.

In one room at Imma, Vicuña invites visitors to write a wish for peace. She is not the first artist to do so. It is a theme that threads through the work of Yoko Ono, whose own Wishing Tree was installed at the former Ormeau Baths Gallery, in Belfast, albeit a generation ago, in 1989. “People can write down their wishes, and hang them from the branches.