The extinct

They were all dead. Three sisters hanged hanging from a stone along with their two dogs who died in the same way and 20 goats with their throats cut. They were Justa, Lucía and Luciana Quispe Cardoso, three Colla sisters who were found dead inside Copiapó in June 1974.

Since then, the event has inspired various works, such as Las brutas, one of the best-known texts by playwright Juan Radrigán. Now, exactly 40 years after the event, the case is revived. The cinema will premiere in September The Quispe Girls, a film by Sebastián Sepúlveda with the performances of Catalina Saavedra, Francisca Gavilán and Digna Quispe, a relative of the deceased sisters.  And at the end of this month she will debut in GAM Las extintas, a dance work that investigates the cause and manner of her death.

“Reviewing the case of the Quispe sisters today, from contemporary dance, is a creative motivation, especially because this story remains an enigma to this day,” explains Andrés Cárdenas, director of the work.

Cárdenas was director of the Balmaceda Arte Joven dance company and ten years ago he founded the Papel Company, with which he won an Altazor award and with which he now explores the history of the three Colla sisters. Born in Copiapó, Cárdenas grew up near the desert where the suicide occurred. But it was the documentary The Quispe Sisters (2008), by Octavio Meneses, that motivated him to take the case to dance. The film questioned whether their death was a collective suicide, an ancestral rite or a murder committed by the military for the help they supposedly gave to communists escaping to Argentina.

The film poster shows them hanging next to their dogs, and it was that image that attracted the director, due to the arrangement of the bodies. Its objective was to return to its history to delve into the worship rites of a people close to extinction, in identity based on memory, all from the corporality, movement and abstraction of contemporary dance.

The work includes images compiled from the judicial file, from the real story and from the Meneses documentary. Oscar Carmona's original music recreates landscapes of the Atacama Desert in a contemporary score, which brings together rhythms from Latin America and international folklore.