Kutina Chaka (The bridge of the return)

Hazy landscapes, anonymous portraits, ethereal visages that represents people from Ayacucho (southern Andes) in Perú’s process of memory. Here in 1980 began the war between Maoist Sendero Luminoso terrorist party and the Army (which also used terrorist methods). Political violence that has outraged Perú for twenty years.

Each august people from Ayacucho provinces gather in Kutina chaka (in quechua means the return bridge) for three days to sing and listen the stories of violence and resilience when they fled from their lands to Andahuaylas crossing the Pampas river bridge. People’s acts in these hills activates memory.

They walk the same path where the bridge was destroyed in reprisal of their scape during the 90s, in the same place where they rebuilt it in 1996 to return to their places.

Despite them, there’s a State’s unfinished work for the retrieval program suggested by the Truth and reconciliation commission in 2003 which analyzed violence period.

Mass graves continue to be exhumed, some who back then were child forced to join one of two armies are proscribed due to a politicized justice and prefer to stay anonymous, involved parties don’t recognize their mistakes, local policies don’t invest in memory processes.

The project represents the contrasts of Ayacucho’s contemporary identity constitution between a violent past that continues to emerge, unattendance of psychological programs, economic oblivion and the perseverance to be highly influential in Perú`s culture.