Chushak Escuelas Cerradas

Chushak is a photozine blending archives, documentary images, testimonies, and data to reveal the impact of school closures in Indigenous Ecuador. A visual outcry for memory, justice, and resistance from abandoned territories.

Chushak is a photozine that emerges as part of a multimedia artistic-documentary project, created to preserve memory and denounce a collective wound. Through a visual narrative that interweaves archival photographs, contemporary documentary images, first-person testimonies, and official data, the project explores the profound and often silenced impact of the mass closure of community schools in Indigenous territories of Ecuador, following the government's reorganization of the national education system.

Far from being merely a record, Chushak (which in Kichwa means “to be left alone” or “abandoned”) is a visual outcry for educational and cultural justice. It is a tapestry of voices and images that reframe the territory as a living archive of resistance. This fanzine becomes an affective and political cartography, where the absence of schools reveals the presence of an absent State—and the strength of a community that refuses to forget.