Hair is a valuable renewable resource that gains value when well transformed, thus enabling social and economic development in a sustainable way. The project celebrates the creative achievements of the Ollantaytambo weavers manufacturing these wigs and highlights Peruvian hair as a new source of income for Andean women – representing a renewal of life and a beacon of hope in the face of difficult circumstances.

CHIQA is a social enterprise that trains weavers in the design, management and marketing of their human hair products. CHIQA's mission is to empower women by providing them with work that will enable them to achieve economic independence in the context of their complex social challenges.

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.