Cantos Cautivos
About the Project
“Los de Chacabuco”, a group created and directed by Ángel Parra. Chacabuco concentration camp
Praised as an “extraordinary digital archive” by Alex Ross (critic of The New Yorker), our project seeks to contribute to the historical memory of the dictatorship and to debates on human rights in other historical and geographical contexts.
The project was conceptualised by Katia Chornik in 2014 and developed initially in collaboration with the Museum of Memory and Human Rights (Santiago, Chile). The project has run independently since 2016, with a new platform developed by Hernán Theiler.
From April 2026 onwards, the site will be part of the Archivo Central Andrés Bello website and jointly developed with the team of Unidad de Estudios y Datos of the Vicerrectoría de Extensión y Comunicación of the Universidad de Chile.
The platform has 168 testimonies collected between December 2014 and June 2025, of which 40 refer to music pieces fully created by political prisoners and 12 refer to music pieces with lyrics created or modified in detention over pre-existing music. To see the testimonies, click here.
Materials from our project formed part of the British Museum’s I Object, Ian Hislop's search for dissent exhibition (2018–19), which explored ways in which human beings have subverted concepts of authority for over three millennia.
To collect materials, we combined online crowdsourcing and edited transcriptions of oral testimonies obtained via interviews and events, and published as per the Terms and Conditions of Participation.
The ideas expressed in the exhibited materials are the responsibility of their authors and do not necessarily represent the views of the project team.
The Cantos Cautivos project is a member of the International Coalition of Sites of Conscience. Cantos Cautivos is a not-for-profit project and adheres to the ethics statements of the Society for Ethnomusicology and the British Forum for Ethnomusicology.
This project's intellectual rights are under registration No. 294916 of the Servicio Nacional del Patrimonio Cultural of Chile.
The project has received funding from:
