 My name is Cecilia Vicuña, I am an Andean animal, I come from the Andes, and my medium is the place where art and poetry find a way to expand into the limitless. If you ask me where I draw inspiration from, from life and death, mostly from the notion that death is always near us and is a freeing force that gives life its pulse. So most of my work tends to disappear or speaks about disappearance as a source of joy, renown and transformation. My mother says that even before I could speak, I was already making art. So something in me knew that there exists something called the pen, the pencil, the brush and instinctively needed to go there and speak while this gesture that is really like a continuation of the energy of your body, the continuation of the energy of your soul into whatever medium. So for me there isn't one medium, but all mediums are available. The main creative ritual that I know of, all the rituals of the body are something so incredibly beautiful. In New York there is a sort of boundless energy from the unfulfilled desires of millions of immigrants that have been coming here for perhaps two centuries or more. This bubbling energy that you feel here can be very oppressive if it becomes pressure, but at the same time it can be something that soothes you into becoming yourself because how else are you going to be able to say something when there are 20 million people trying to say something? I have loved the Brooklyn Museum since I first came to New York in 1980 and its pre-Columbian collection is one of the treasures of the world. So I hope this installation of mine not only brings attention to the immensity of this textile tradition that people say is the most complex achievement in terms of textile anywhere in the world. And that has been really forgotten and overlooked. In most museums that do have a pre-Columbian collection, that room is usually empty. Most people ignore or have no idea of the richness of that universe. I hope my disappeared people shows people that there is a universe about to be discovered.