The Quipu Project. Digital oral history archive and interactive website by Chaka Studios (review)

The Quipu Project is a digital oral history archive and interactive documentary consisting of interviews with victims of a sterilization campaign carried out in the 1990s under the aegis of Alberto Fujimori, president of Peru from 1990 to 2000, during the height of his power. Over the course of six years, Fujimori's government sterilized over 280,000 people, mainly women, many of whom did not consent to the procedure. The archive seeks to document firsthand testimonies of the Fujimori regime's transgressions, while also providing a network of support for those who have been affected by the sterilization campaign. In addition to the archive, the Quipu Project includes a twenty-minute film and a blog.

While there have been multiple attempts to aid the victims of sterilization, as well as campaigns for the recognition of the atrocity, the Quipu Project is the first to address the language and literacy barriers; the majority of Fujimori's victims are poor, live in remote areas, and only speak the local language, Quechua, making communication with Spanish-speaking government officials difficult. The Quipu Project uses a phone line to receive testimony, which the project then transcribes into multiple languages and uploads to the archive. While a phone line reduces the audio quality of the testimonies, the efficiency and breadth of this method—as well as the confirmation and transcription of each testimony—make up for what is only a minor technical drawback. Messages from the project's collaborators are also included in the archive, with the intention of creating a dialectic resource to engage the interest of its audience.

The archive itself consists of a central ring, from which the oral testimonies branch off in different threads. Transcriptions of the testimonies run across the screen as the audio from the subjects' phone messages plays, detailing both the campaign and their lives following sterilization. While this fits the archive's aesthetic and the audio can be paused, the lack of full transcripts can make it harder to analyze entire testimonies for scholarly study. Different aspects of the testimonies are represented on the threads by dots of various colors; users interested in one particular aspect of the archive's content (for example, a student looking for the lasting impact of Fujimori's campaign on the lives of the victims) can identify the sections of testimony that address their specific interests. In addition to sections about the program's organization and operation, the physical sterilization procedures, life after sterilization, and an area for the men and women seeking reparations, a separate section of the archive catalogues user responses to testimonies shared in the Quipu Project.

Aesthetically, the archive emulates an Andean form of record-keeping called Quipu, which uses various colored cotton threads to share complex stories. This connection allows the Quipu Project to tie its activism to the region's long indigenous history and traditions, as well as to distinguish itself creatively from other oral history archives.

Compared to well-funded projects or those associated with scholarly institutions, the Quipu Project, with its reliance on crowdfunding and its distance from centralized academia, has garnered less scholarly attention, limiting its potential reach. Its method of collection—through a phone line—is also unlike that of typical oral history projects in which the testimonies are obtained by recording one-on-one, face-to-face interviews with subjects. The lack of a formal interviewer may be more comforting to the narrators, given the sensitive content of the testimonies; victims may feel more forthcoming with recollections because of the perceived safety of this technological distance.

The Quipu Project distinguishes itself in these ways because of the project's agenda; the cataloguing of oral history itself is secondary to the project's political goals of activism regarding the sterilization campaign, with a stated "intention that these stories are never forgotten, that these abuses will never be repeated." In this way...