Talking Knots
sound installation
2023 Bremen, Germany.
A drift that holds, transports and mobilises you
By a stream
By others
With others
A sought movement
Turns passivity into tenderness
But there is also
Mobilisation by force
And the violence that underlies this.
I have understand that
Each movilización was a reaction
I can going out for a walk
At night
I am able to do what
I could not do before
I try to understand
A new, unreadable
But liberating
Environment, place
While challenging
The fear that is present
Here and there.
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)