Local Voices

At the same time, two consultations carried out with the Vicos Governing Council, the community's highest political authority, resulted in an official document requesting the support of the two NGOs so that the community could recover the information about the Peru-Cornell Project "... that is to be found in Cornell University and is important for our history and communal culture." In their words: "It is sad when we forget." "It would be a great legacy for us, like tools for our children." That request gave the formal beginning to the Living Memory Project, which began with the practical objective: to respond to the Community of Vicos' request by delivering copies of some of the documentary materials from the Cornell-Peru Project that are archived in the libraries of Cornell University. With the university's support, a documentary, five short films and some 170 black and white photographs, color slides and panoramas were digitalized; in addition 48 of these photographs were reproduced in large format, high quality prints (after entering collections site, click on View the Images then choose the Billie Jean Isbell Andean Collection and click support).

In 2004, copies of the digitalized materials were returned and delivered to the governing council, the primary school, and the secondary school in Vicos. Meanwhile, the printed photographs were included in the permanent exhibition in La Casa de los Abuelos (the Grandparents' House), the community's cultural center. During two months, eight presentations of the visual materials were made in the Community Hall, the primary school and the secondary school in Vicos, with more than 1,100 Vicosinos attending. These reunions were considered the memory "update" phase whereby the audience acted as spectators. This set the stage for the later process of dialogue or group reflection that was to follow.

Meanwhile, the two NGOs offered to accompany the Vicosinos who were interested in the process of "thinking together" about their past and the manifold meanings that this past has for their present and future. After the interest of some Vicosinos, a second stage of the Living Memory Project was initiated. It took the form of a participatory research starting from the dialogue between local memories and collective reflection. In this sense, the Living Memory Project proposed a constructive type of investigation (rather than an extractive type), in a process in which both external researchers and local co-researchers agreed with each step of the project, from the setting up the objectives to its execution, sharing the production of the knowledge and the interpretation of the results. For them, the objectives of the Living Memory Project were redefined: the Vicosinos involved wanted "to know more about the times of our grandparents" and "for our children to know (about those times)." The external institutions hoped to better understand the impacts of the development projects from the local perspective in order to elaborate better frameworks and strategies in working with communities, and at the same time evaluate the effectiveness of participatory research in opening inclusive spaces for collective reflection.