How can data become a language of relation, care, and reciprocity? Amazonian Calendars brings together Quechua communities, designers, and researchers to explore Indigenous ways of visualizing time and knowledge, through cycles, seasons, and stories of place.

Led by Catherine D’Ignazio and Claudia Tomateo, a Quechua Chanka PhD student, the project works with PRATEC, a nonprofit that has facilitated the creation of community calendars for over 35 years.

These large-scale calendars visualize ancestral activities, regenerate biocultural diversity, and communicate knowledge through artistic depictions of humans, animals, water, and forests. Each calendar uniquely represents Quechua Amazonian worldviews—what the collaborators call “cosmo-visualizations” that embody cross-cultural and generational expressions of worldmaking.

Using Indigenous methodologies grounded in the principles of respect, reciprocity, relevance, and responsibility, the team will co-design an exhibition featuring these calendars alongside the Information+ 2025 Conference at MIT. Girvan Tuanama Fasabi, a Quechua visualizer, will travel to Cambridge to present the work and engage in dialogue with data visualization practitioners about expanding the field beyond Western-centric aesthetic practices.

The project emphasizes orality as a foundation for artistic expression and creates space for calendars to be explained from the communities’ own perspectives, amplifying Indigenous voices in conversations about data, design, and knowledge representation.

This exhibition emerges from ongoing collaborations with the Simbakiwi Yaku, Yaku Shutuna Rumi, and Maray communities in the Amazon of so called Peru, and is part of a growing dialogue on Indigenous data sovereignty and design. Join us to experience this living archive of calendars, films, and voices that remind us that data is never abstract, it is always situated, communal, and alive.