Talking Knots
sound installation
2023 Bremen, Germany.
It is no matter of choice: To be heard
I follow all the rules
I prepare myself
I take a deep breath
I look into your eyes
And I act like I'm using those words not for the first time
However, the recipe always fails me: Between the letters
especially between the consonants Sounds come out
That give away
That I am not necessarily part
And that above all, my mother tongue
The one I love and twist while trying to fit in Comes from the other side of the ocean.
When I fail in pretending
I am immediately harried And treated
As the one who doesn't know What she is saying.
What a weariness
To have to live every moment Dressing up like the one Who in fact
I am
After coming to Germany, I felt immediately a contradictory desire to reconnect with what I left behind. The cultural differences began to affect me deeply, and started to talk to my friends about this feeling. I connected with people from Latin America here with whom I shared similar perspectives and feelings, and after many intimate conversations this work emerged like an attempt to connect ancestral techniques, digital media and the story of this object.
The quipu, considered the first Andean textile computer, is based on a decimal system that encodes information through sequences of 0’s and 1’s. Over time, however, I began to see it not only as a tool for recording numerical data but also as a carrier for stories.
I also started to see all the people who decided to leave their homelands —bodies carrying histories and narratives to tell–, in the same way that a quipu would travel across the south american territory to deliver a message.
I invited my friends to write poems about migration, which I then “encoded” into the quipu. Each string represents a poem, and the knots correspond to the number of lines in it. By touching the knots —with magnetic sensors on the top of them— the recorded voices of the poems are activated, and you can hear the voices of the people reciting the poems.
Pictures by Hsun-Hsiang Hsu (ig @piebeehsu)