Cecilia Vicuña has lost her voice. To achieve an interview we must huddle, masked, so that I can hear her: whispering, rasping, barely sculpting sounds with the passage of her breath. Each word is hard won. She speaks with exquisite purpose.

Vicuña considers the particular atmosphere of Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall to be the culprit, though we might also blame her accelerated schedule. It’s been a non-stop year for the Chilean artist and poet. In March, she was awarded a Golden Lion for lifetime achievement ahead of her presentation at the Venice Biennale. In May, a huge survey opened at New York’s Guggenheim. It’s enough to make anyone feel giddy, let alone hoarse.

For five weeks she turned the former industrial space at the heart of Britain’s largest gallery into a functioning studio. “For me, the Turbine Hall is beautiful,” she said, reminding me of the noble materials used in this mid 20th century structure. This chamber is full of history: “the coolness and the dampness of whatever pollution contamination happened here is still with us. To work in a space like that, it’s also a healing process. We cannot deny or negate what the industrial era has given us, we have to incorporate it but reorient it now. So that is a gift.”

Η συνέχεια εδώ.