Warmikuna

Warmikuna is a Quechua word that means “women”. Warmikuna - Voices, Faces, and Memories is a trilingual (Quechua-Spanish-French) research-creation/action project, both digital and museographic, dedicated to the narratives and memories of Indigenous Peruvian women in the context of political violence.

Conceived simultaneously as a tool, a medium, and a space for empowerment, this project is based on alternative and collaborative methodologies developed in close coordination with the Asociación Nacional de Familiares de Secuestrados, Detenidos y Desaparecidos del Perú (ANFASEP). The project brings into circulaton original materials, such as chants, embroidery, stories and photographs, that document experiences of gendered-based political violence and peacebuilding.

Singing to tell
For a long time, chanting has been a means for Andean women to express their experiences of violence, often confined to intimate and private contexts. The axis Cantar para contar (Singing to tell) marked the project’s starting point. It allowed for the creation of a shared framework to make these songs audible: a space for recording and restitution where they are no longer isolated but shared as a common experience. Designed as an ethical research-creation/action approach (careful on not reproducing extractivist logics or revictimization) the initiative prioritizes co-construction and collective recognition. Thanks to their recording and online dissemination via the project’s digital humanities component, this repertoire of chants now circulates beyond Ayacucho and has become accessible in several regions of the world.

Participatory Museography

Within Warmikuna, a localized methodology of participatory museography was developed with the ANFASEP, at the intersection of research-creation and research-action, and nourished by Andean and feminist epistemologies. The project was based on the co-construction of content and practices of care in the management of workshops, translations, and exhibition design.
Between 2019 and 2024, a series of workshops were held in Ayacucho and Paris, categorized into three formats: sensory mapping, embroidery on photography, and offering-embroidery/knitting. Throughout these encounters, the exhibition materials were collectively developed and continue to evolve. These workshops turned the exhibition into a space of shared mediation, where the produced materials circulate, are restored, and are reactivated in a dynamic of transmission and collective creation.

The Exhibition

The exhibition brought together a selection of field photographs (2017–2024) made by Tania Romero Barrios, along with embroideries and Quechua songs created by members of ANFASEP. These materials form a living corpus of oral and visual history that accounts for life trajectories marked by experiences of forced disappearances and pluralistic peacebuilding processes in the post-war period.
The exhibition proposes a triple decentering (linguistic, geographical, and epistemological) by placing the voices of Andean women at the heart of narratives of political violence. By affirming the centrality of Quechua (a language of poetic, critical, and memorial conceptualization) it highlights the necessity of thinking about memory, war, and peace through Indigenous languages.
The exhibition was as a space for collective mediation based on the co-construction of knowledge, alternative writings, and the principles of open science. It is also part of an approach to "participatory matrimonialization", where images, songs, texts, and embroideries become living archives of the struggles for justice and memory. As a itinerant exhibition, it is addressed both to the protagonists who shaped it and to the various audiences invited to take an active part in its construction.

"Cantar para contar"

This is a corpus of Quechua songs recorded between 2019 and 2024 through several years of collective work with the ANFASEP association. These songs reflect the individual and collective life trajectories of its members, their grief, their struggles, and their victories.

🎵 “Papelchallaytam apamuyki” (I just brought my papers)

🎵 "Verdadta munaspa justiciallata" (Truth and justice)

🎵 “Kuyay wawallay” (My beloved son)

Purichkanchik
A photographic archive originating from various fieldwork projects carried out between 2017 and 2022, recounting stories of the armed conflict in Peru and the organizational process of ANFASEP
A dialogue between songs and photographs.