The Quipu Project
"If you have been sterilized or known someone who has been sterilized. Welcome to Quipu".
A collective archieve
A voice
welcomes women victims and their stories. Designed in 2011, in collaboration with Amnesty International and other local offices, the Quipu project is a collective memory archive.
The project takes its name from a term from the Quechua dialect spoken in Cuzco which means "node". Quipus are knotted cords that were used by the Incas and ancient Andean civilizations to
transmit complex messages. The knot numbering system of the Incas was a system of great historical importance since it was the only form of "writing" of the Empire's data, and was used for the
census of the population, the soldiers and for the inventory of the deposits of the real warehouses and the assets of each province.
The colour of each string indicated the nature of the recorded object and a series of nodes indicated its quantity, according to a decimal, positional numbering system, so that the same node could have a different value, depending on the position in which it was located. This interactive documentary is a contemporary interpretation of this system, where each string represents a voice, a woman, a story.
A telephone line
A combination of a telephone line and a high technology allows those who live in the remote villages of the Andes to make their voices heard. Thanks to the work of Giulia Tamayo, human rights activist, Rosemarie Lerner, Maria Court, Sebastian Melo and Ewan Cass-Kavanagh give life to this interactive documentary which focuses on Peruvian women forcibly sterilized during the Fujimori government. Their voices, which took a long time to come to light due to the lack of access to the means of representation in their isolated villages, now denounce and demand justice. To ensure technology was not a barrier to participation, the Quipu Project distributed simple mobile phones throughout villages and used radio advertisements to publicize the project, explaining that contributors can leave testimonies in their native Quechua rather than Spanish and that their testimonies would remain unaltered. The Spanish and Quechua are subtitled in English, and not dubbed. Some advisors suggested voice-overs to avoid subtitles on audio on the website, but the Quipu team was committed to leave the original stories and voices, without the mediation of a researcher or translator.
A Call for justice
Quipu is a platform that aims to spread the truth in Peru and the rest of the world on this atrocious page of history. Those affected mainly came from indigenous communities in rural areas of Peru and thousands of them said that what they did was without their informed consent. Many of them are illiterate or speak only Quechua, which makes it very difficult to access the institutions of the Peruvian state, which work almost exclusively in Spanish. It was only after the resignation of President Fujimori in 2000 that the injustices of sterilization really began to reveal themselves. After almost two decades these people are still searching for justice. Through a specially developed telephone line connected to this website, the testimonies of about 150 sterilized people were collected and are continuously added to the website, so the interactive documentary is a ‘living’ project that continues to grow and evolve. This open-ended structure reflected the non-linear nature of the production phases and how the issue of forced sterilization continues to be unresolved until justice is achieved. It is hoped that the number of testimonies will continue to grow and connect in order to build a community around this common fact.
This website is edited by:
Alessia Turi Denisa Cosnita Francesca Russo Martina Caradonna Natascia Bettoni