CHIQA’s mission brings hope to an often-overlooked population. By harnessing the potential of their own hair, these women are challenging cultural norms and forging a path towards financial independence. Through training, design, and marketing, CHIQA is revealing Peruvian hair as a valuable and untapped resource. 

This project is more than a showcase - it is a testament to the strength and resilience of Andean women. By valuing their hair, they are affirming their worth, their skills, and their determination.

Can a play on words capture the coexistence of many possible meanings?

The conundrum of their entanglement
with a history yearning to be collective.
But inevitably unravelled in multiple, singular, stories.

Such as those of the ordinary / extraordinary women
captured by these intriguing images of the everyday doings
of an eccentric start-up initiated barely two years ago
in Huayronccoyoc Pampa, at the outskirts of Ollantaytambo,
one of Cuzco's most paradoxical towns:
a once small, semirural community,
with outstanding Inka origins, and monuments,
transfigured by the tantalizing bounties
derived from its transformation into the most important outpost
en route to the dreamlands of Machu Picchu.

Exposed in their narrative, as well as in their artistry.
There is something liberating in these images.
Almost libertarian.
Inscribed in them we can ponder the emancipatory potential
of such innovative enterprises.

Particularly for rural women:
the validity they thus attain in a different market economy
permits them to acquire not just a trade but a certain autonomy.

And, above all, a sense of agency that loosens their entrapment
within the constraints of their disrupted community.
Ollantaytambo's (post)modern weavers
manage to elude some (some) of the archaic burdens
placed on the feminine condition in peasant societies.
But they do so without falling prey to the bastardizing demands
of turning their real selves into the simulacra
of an essentialized identity paraded as a banal commodity
for quick consumption by tourists.

These women do not perform their identity.
They metabolize it.
They are not spoken for by the past,
although the past undeniably inhabits them.
They transform it into their present, actual, existences.
In a plural sense that recognizes, and enhances,
their contemporary singularities.

Her heir, her hair, her hæirloom.
Not an inheritance but a heritage.
A legacy and a future, no matter how awkwardly assumed.