tara's tierra

Cocalero

I saw a great film tonight called Cocalero. Alejandro Landes (who, on a frivolous side note, looks kind of cute on the film website), currently based in Buenos Aires but born in Brazil, filmed it and it is his first full-length documentary. Landes got to Bolivia in October of 2005 and followed Evo as he campaigned for the presidency. There is breathtaking footage from the Chapare region (the coca producing yungas around Cochabamba) and the footage of La Paz made me want to be in the plaza de San Francisco tomorrow. I liked the footage of Evo swimming in a river by his family's land in his boxers with his main campaign managers. Politics should be about people in "real life" moments, and that is what this film demonstrates.  I also really enjoyed the footage from the protests of the Summit of the Americas in Buenos Aires. The crowd's energy is palbably contagious.I won't speak too much more for the film, since you should see it yourself! But, a visually-appealing, musically-stimulating (make sure your volume is up!) website will give you a taste. Sorry if my writing is flat tonight, I'm quite tired. ¡Qué viva la coca! En serio. ¡MAS MAS MAS! (A familiarity with the Bolivian regional politics will make you appreciate the Santa Cruz scenes more, and particularly a funny interview between Evo and a Santa Cruz television host...but even without a baseline, go just to see how astoundingly beatiful Bolivia's landscape, people, and spirit are).

Lost in Translation

It may seem like an obvious observation, but I will state it anyway: it is extremely difficult to translate what you are thinking about to other people. And not only that, it is entirely frustrating to translate what you are thinking about to yourself. I mean, not a vague idea, but the pithy center of what it is you are trying to say (god dammit!).  For years, well, really, for almost all of graduate school and maybe beforehand, I have always looked at visual art as a source of inspiration for twenty-page papers or even just two-page papers. However, instead of actually questioning why I do this and reflecting upon it with any seriousness, I have just done it, not thought much about it and never formally written about it nor even consciously considered it an essential step to my creative process.

Yesterday in Doe I descended the elevator to Level D with seven call numbers jotted down on the back of a receipt. Five of them were PQs, one was a PN, and one was an N. And which was I most excited about getting? Which one did I get first? The N, Entre la pachamama y la galería de arte: Vidas y propuestas de artistas paceños de origen aymara y quechua, published by Plural in 2006. As I perused the book a half an hour later, I started feeling that surge of urgency that I cannot quite place, but that causes me to walk faster and get up earlier.  I was studying an image of Ramón Tito's sculpture "Origen" (2001)  [Link to Description of Artist: scroll down]   , an image I cannot locate electronically, but that resembles, of course, a bellybutton.

Writing about visual art is a hard task and as someone who at the end of the day is trained in literature, I always feel wary about wading into the visual as if I have a right to talk about it. But maybe this is what is so freeing about those glossy pages. The images are accessible to me just as they are, and it does not matter whether I speak English, German, or Quechua. I can experience the image without reference books on hand and in my case, use it as a metaphoric tool for translation. This is to say, I find in the visual art of this specific artist, Ramón Tito, of Aymara origins but a La Paz zipcode, something that seems to help me see what the act of cultural translation itself is: capturing that surge of urgency I mentioned before, that energy that is behind artistic creation in whatever medium or language it manifests itself. 

I don't see things the way you do nor do I see them the way the artist does, but the desire within us to be understood and to understand, to translate ourselves pervades every aspect of life. And I believe that when words fail, when the dictionaries and thesauruses and encyclopedias and news articles just won't cut it, that is when the energy that catalyzes lasting cultural translation has the hope of emerging.

Andean Pop Art from La Paz

The New York Times Article (from Sunday's paper).

A New Adventure for the Student

Now that my exams are over, I feel a great sense of hope and desire to embark on an exciting dissertation that involves digging in dusty drawers, throwing clay or red paint, and in the end really contributing something meaningful to a collective thinking community. Even if that community is three people, it will be meaningful because I will have created it. In all things create! In large part, the exam process is a good preparation for the dissertation if you select your reading lists wisely and execute well. A well-balanced committee helps, too.  It forces one to build new networks of neurons that are primed, right about now, to start getting down the important start to the dissertation.  And right now is a great time to work because there is zero pressure. I have the entire summer ahead of me to think about what I might want to do, with space to breathe, and imagine, and doodle.

Today, with no pressure, I was perusing the old trusty Google search for Bolivian artists and came across a new name, Cecilia Lampo, a Bolivian artist living in La Paz but who was largely educated in art in Germany. Lo and behold, Lampo has a fantastic painting of a bellybutton. An abstract, bright red bellybutton. (I am so happy exams are over because now I can write again, with renewed vim and vigor. Ahhh. Just realized how much I've missed it).
I have to fill out some paperwork about working with human subjects because I think that surely part of my dissertation will include an interview or two.  And I will pay extra, lots extra, to include visual images. Here's a copy of Lampo's appropriately titled "Ombligo":




 

photo of a place i wish i were each day

Mining in Potosí + Whining in SF

Tonight I made time for the CLAS Cine Documental Film Series, and saw a slightly depressing but very well executed documentary called The Devil's Miner  in Kroeber (the Anthro/Art Department at Berkeley). The movie is visually striking and the two children in it, brothers, are wise beyond their years. From a teaching perspective, as I just emailed to a friend, the film is ideal for a Spanish 3 or 4 class because the Spanish is clear and slowly spoken since the film is a meandering look at a very serious social problem in Bolivia -- child labor in the Cerro Rico mines. The scenes of the markets, and one particular scene filmed in the barber shop, really had me longing for Bolivia -- for the air, for the smiles, for the burned cheeks, for the salteñas at 10am on el Prado in Cochabamba. Ahhh. Those were the days. However, the dust and the relentless noise of drilling did not have be longing to meet El Tio face to face (the devil that protects the miners, strange as it may seem, in the underworld of the mineral maze).

But, I am escaping from my less than pink reality. Outside of the theatre, I am knee deep in exam committee formation, a Quechua translation exam that must be taken, and all things administrative. God, I hate administering anything. Paperwork, fine print, rules, regulations, details, the norm, checked boxes, signed lines, letters of recommendation, course requirements, all of it....be gone! be gone! be gone! I will forge ahead though and not let the administering get the best of me because there is too much real work to be done! 

Rain is upon the Bay Area. It's damp and cold and soggy. Now that I figured out how to insert links to my blog, it shall be a whole new world. Hold on to your rubber boots. I have many a muddy puddle to splash.

Rupturas.Gritos.Graffitis.

Hay algo en el aire. I am not sure what (maybe fall?), but I like it, for sure. I am back to reading things I want to read, ohthankgod. ohthankgod. Life's unmanageable without escaping into the orb of literature, Bolivia, and my too scary imagination. In his article on Mujeres Creando, Leaonardo García-Pabón (a professor and expert on Bolivia who teaches at the University of Oregon) writes at the end, "Para terminar, digamos que la molestia que Mujeres Creando produce en la sociedad paceña se debe no tanto a sus demostraciones políticas, ni a sus acciones artísticas escadalosas cargados de referencias a su sexualidad, sino a las rupturas de espacios rígidamente definidos: política, arte, calle, lesbianas."

Ruptures. In my class on cross-dressing in early-Modern Spanish theatre, we are also discussing ruptures. The way that women rupture the bubbles they are pushed into (like convents) in order to go out into the world, swing a sword, and kick some serious caballero ass.

I like the way García Pabón summarizes what Mujeres Creando have done in La Paz, (1) in terms of criticizing the patriarchy, period, at all levels of the national imaginary; (2) in terms of the poetic effect they have created with their writing all over the walls of La Paz; and (3) the fact that they sign their texts:

  The red part in the center there reads, "Mujeres Creando," with the symbol they draw of the female symbol with the anarchist symbol at the top of it. The poetry they have put up all over La Paz and El Alto has received a substantial amount of attention and I have already written quite a bit about it here, but I cannot leave this project.  Their writings take back a city space that was ruled for such a long time by other authors and they, in Judith Butler terms, deploy power back at the system, authorizing themselves to write where they wish; to sign their names where they feel like it. And hell yeah they should.

As Julieta Paredes says, and is quoted by García Pabón, Mujeres Creando has changed street paintings typically used by politicians described as: "lenguaje guerrero, pocos verbos, la poesía estaba ausente, era un lenguaje repetitivo, machista y homofóbico." Instead, the words that MC have written are poetic and feminist in that they create a counterdiscourse to the male hegemony that has historically structured the sociopolitical system of Bolivia. I want to know, among other things, how the writings of Mujeres Creando have affected other artists and writers in Bolivia? Have they led to the production of more feminist writing in more "traditional" forms? Have they turned off elite writers? And I also want to figure out how to write  a dissertation around revolucionary forms and revolutionary ideas, the spaces they metaphorically and literally create in order to push on the walls of language, the walls of government, the walls of class, the walls of race, the walls of gender, and those literal walls that we are confined in every day as we walk down the cement streets, brick slabs, and wood fences.

Poking holes is fun. Popping balloons is satisfying. Rupture yourself. Rupture someone else. Rupture emotion. Rupture the skin so that a little raw emotion can ooze out. It's beautiful when you're raw and I promise I won't hurt you just because you have put yourself out there.

 

Alejandra otra vez

After doing some extensive googling, I finally found some of Alejandra Dorado's earlier work:

There is a very useful website on Bolivian art that provides an overview of the various historical art movements in Bolivia and offers a range of images and CVs for the corresponding artists: http://www.fundes.org. It is interesting that Alejandra Dorado takes up religious imagery in revisionist way, as does Kiki Smith, as do so many other female artists and writers. I know that the first time Dorado presented her work in Cochabamba it raised many an eyebrow, to the extent that she was unsure whether or not she wanted to go back to her native country ever again (she studied in Chile), at least in the capacity of an artist.

It's good to raise eyebrows though, it makes the world keep going.

And speaking of the world, is it not in shambles? John Mayer's new song, "Waiting for the World to Change", to me, hits the damn nail on the head. Quite crazy that my highschool classmate is the voice of a generation. But, it is where it's at. We don't know what the hell to do anymore, we care, but are at a loss in terms of what type of tangible action to take to improve things until Nuestro querido arbusto has abandoned the throne. So yeah, here I am, waiting for the world at large to change. I'd like to think writing this blog does some little teeny, tiny, itty bitty thing, even if it just changes my bad mood by getting things down on a screen.

I want to go back to Bolivia tomorrow. Here's another one (that is Alejandra in the photo):

Blue Boxes and Stone Dolls

I am going to make a concerted effort here to disseminate more names of artists and writers working in Bolivia because entirely too few of them are known up North, or outside of their locality for that matter. I spent a good two hours at the fairly small Museo de Arte Contemporáneo in La Paz, jotting down new names, and have read a few books on Bolivian contemporary art, one in particular that I got a lot out of titled La ciudad imaginaria.

This image, titled Los ansiosos is by a Slovenian born artist, Ejti Stih, who became a Bolivian citizen after she got married. She currently lives in Santa Cruz, and this piece is from a series she did called "Cajas azules" -- Blue boxes. I personally am always drawn to the color blue, especially deep indigo shades of it. There is something at once sad and soothing about the blue shadowiness of Stih's series. The boxes, and the notion of a house of anxiety, remind me of El Alto a little bit.

This second image is by Guiomar Mesa, the sister of one time Bolivian President Carlos Mesa. It is titled Muñeca de piedra. G. Mesa is included in the book La ciudad imaginaria, which talks about the relationship between Bolivian painting and popular culture, as well as in the proceedings from a conference titled "Dialogos sobre escritura y mujeres" that took place in La Paz in 1998. The proceedings are interesting to juxtapose with the discussions that went on around women/writing at the Association of Bolivian Studies conference this summer in Sucre.

Happy Viewing.