A family affair

Behind a black door at 2448 Avenida Ecuador lies 'La Casa de las Flaviadas.' But it is much more than a home - it is a shrine to classical music and the life of a man with a passion.

Every Saturday at six o'clock a ritual begins behind the black door on Ecuador. The Flavianos gather to worship. They worship Beethoven, Brahms and Bach. They also pay their respects to Don Flavio Machicado Viscarra - the father of the Flaviadas.

The salon of his 73 year-old home was built solely for people to gather and listen. For this occasion the room is dimly lit and incense is burning. In the front of the room a memorial to the great musical creators, in the form of a stained glass window, shines over the meeting. The mismatched sofas and chairs mirror their occupants - diverse. There are tourists, expats and bolivianos, children and their grandparents, first-timers and experienced Flaviadas.

In the corner a grey-haired man sits in his best Sunday suit (even though it is a Saturday). He is an unusual disc jockey but he uses state-of-the-art equipment. Every weekend he spins vinyl records, cassettes and CDs that keep the crowd returning. He is the son of Don Flavio, Eduardo Machicado Saravia.

At this gathering there is an unwrit­ten rule - silence is required. The attendees sit with closed eyes and mouths. They close off all other senses so that their ears and minds and hearts are open to the musi­cal selection.

""The sense of it [the Flaviada], according to my father, is to be a cultural center, and also to let the people have a space to get lost, to be able to disconnect them­selves from the world,"" says Don Eduardo.

Don Flavio never played an instru­ment but his passion for music went beyond physical talent. His love of music was nourished in the Boston of the early 1900s. He bought a stereo and began to collect records and listen to music at nights in his apartment while his neighbors gathered to enjoy. When he returned to La Paz in 1938 it was his family members (the majority of whom are also well-known in the arts commu­nity), intellectuals and friends who gathered.

Some of the big names who have visited 'La Casa de las Flaviadas' include both international sensa­tions and local Bolivian academia, such as Cecilio Guzman de Rojas (indigenous artist who founded the School of Fine Arts in La Paz),

Leonard Bernstein (the American composer best known for his work on West Side Story), and Jaime Saenz (a famous paceno writer).

""This was an exceptional house,"" Don Eduardo tells me, ""because of the meetings of a special group, intellectual people from different social origins. I asked my father: 'Why do you do this?' And he answered: 'Well, having so much and not sharing it would be a crime.'""

Now the house is home to La Fundacion Flavio Machicado Viscarra. It is always open and always humming with classical music. The Flavianos enter and exit as they please. Everyone is welcome from the seasoned composer to the drifting foreigner.

""I think what a tourist can get from it is to participate in a tradition. It is not a cliche, it is not part of the gringo tour, and it is not made for tourists. But everybody is welcome here because beyond being a tourist you are a human being,"" says granddaughter Cristina Ma­chicado, who has been helping with the foundation for the last two years.

The house is also adorned with an immaculate collection of books, newspapers, magazines and records. Don Flavio subscribed to papers in France, England and the United States following his return to Bolivia in the 1920s. He thrived on collecting music and information about music.

""My father used to say that a disc is like a book - a register that can be saved. For example the work of Ramanin when he plays his own compositions, or of Stravinsky when he directs in his own way. This is an archive,"" says Don Edu­ardo.

Therefore, sitting in on a Flaviada is an educational experience as well. Before every piece Don Edu­ardo educates the listeners on the life and sentiments of each artist, just as his father did. He also con­tinues to keep impeccable records of letters, articles, and drawings about the Flaviadas. Although he did not consider himself an expert, Don Flavio was a definite aficio­nado.

""The only thing I think must go on is comprehension, this thing of sharing his passion. All this material has to be accessible to anyone, not only artists or art students or intellectu­als, just people who are interested and curious,"" says Cristina.

The story of the Flaviadas is also the story of a family. After Don Flavio's death in 1986, his youngest son Eduardo took the helm of the Fla­viadas. Eduardo grew up listening to the music and mingling with the intellectuals and commoners that passed through. Like all Flavianos, his understanding of music was enhanced by his close relationship with his father:

""When I was a kid I used to go to concerts with my father and he used to say that in the end your life is the continuity of what the one before you did, and I can see it, with my children. Cristina, for example, didn't know my father, but she talks about him as if she'd been seeing him doing everything each day.""

During the first Flaviada of the year Beethoven's Ninth Symphony could always be heard coming from Ave. Ecuador. It is a tradition of Don Flavio's that his son and granddaughter continue today. ""The Flaviada is a family thing,"" says Cristina. ""The name comes from Flavio. It is a synonym and here it means to go to Don Flavio's house to listen to music.""

Mads Ryle interviews Eduardo Lopez Zavala, director of Inal Mama

My first cultural outing after arriving in La Paz in December was to sneak into the premier of Inal Mama at the Cinemateca Boliviano, followed by a live performance of the documentary's powerful soundtrack from La Paz favourites Atajo and friends in the cinema's basement carpark.

It was only after seeing the film again with English subtitles at the studio of director Eduardo Lopez Zavala - and interviewing the man - that I was able to appreciate what an apt introduc­tion to Bolivia Inal Mama is. As a 'po­litical, musical and visual essay about coca and cocaine in the cultures of Bolivia', it interweaves various social, historical, cultural and political facets of this country, and presents them in an audiovisual journey that takes us from the isolated Andean homes of the Kallawayas to the coca pro­ducing lands of the Yungas, down into the mines of Chapare and inside the overcrowded walls of La Paz's San Pedro prison.

""For me coca is an excuse to talk about Bolivia"", Lopez explains, ""and to talk about the country, placing it in a regional context and within a globalised conflict."" That excuse was made possible in 2006 when Lopez secured Bolivia's first ever DOCTV-IB America award to develop the project. At the time he was in Brazil preparing for the restoration of the rediscovered silent cinema gem Wara Wara, but he raced back to La Paz and ""wrote the project in one weekend or some­thing.""

""Inal Mama has a continuity with other, older works"", Lopez tells me. His ""clearly interventionist"" Camino de las almas focussed on the weaving community of Coroma, whose ""strong connection with their heritage is contained in their textiles."" It became apparent that these textiles were subject to widespread smuggling - ""A business much more fertile and lucra­tive than cocaine,"" says Lopez. ""This trafficking of heritage bothered me greatly...and this documentary an­nounces in various ways what would later be seen in Inal Mama, in the theme of the heritage of coca, the heritage of cultures.""

Lopez mentions more than once that various people questioned why Inal Mama doesn't ""make the theme of narcotrafficking more prominent? Or why not the new culture of coca, that of the cocaleros, which is Evo [Mo­rales]?...Why isn't it more concerned with crack, with the youth...? "" And his response is that ""the intention of the script of Inal Mama was for coca to be placed within the social fabric... which is where they have a clearer sense of it. Because coca produces an economic value and it produces a symbolic value, an abstract value.""

Within the film this economic dimen­sion is particularly located in the figure of Nacipio, an inmate of San Pedro prison who was incarcerated for smuggling cocaine between Bolivia and his native Brazil. Inside and outside the walls of San Pedro (where it is known that backpackers can enter and buy cocaine), we also see protes­tors with stitched lips demanding the modification of Law 1008, imposed as part of the USA's goal of total elimina­tion of coca and cocaine produc­tion.

The symbolic aspects of coca culture are captured by two Kallawayas, members of traditional pre-lnca healing communities, whose journeys help create Inal Mama's narrative framework. The meeting point of these value systems is demonstrated in the bringing together of the coca producers of the Yungas and the Huarani community representatives who travel to meet them:

""The world today is one economy"", says Lopez, ""with many territories. And for me coca is an economic territory... that I wanted to survey, that I wanted to show. Hence this articulation between peoples so distant from one another, and who can't easily meet, such as the Huaranis and the Afrobolivians of the Yungas, or the Kallawa­yas and the miners. Various things went to tying them together which re­ally had as it were a symbolic, cultural and economic force in coca.""

""I use documentary as a provocative process,"" he continues. ""The Huara­nis have come to Chicaloma in the Yungas, have travelled three days to meet with the producers of coca there...The idea was that these bor­ders that impede coca arriving clean and arriving at a good price could be erased."" In the film we see these negotiations taking place directly between these community representa­tives, carving out an 'economic territory' that defies the normal patterns of global capitalism.

Woven into the social fabric of these communities in which the film is placed is the ""profoundly materialist"" Aymara theology which divides the world into 'Alaj Pacha' (the world above), 'Aka Pacha' (the world we inhabit), and 'Uku Pacha' (the world below). There is no moral criteria between them, as Lopez explains: ""they are comple­mentary, they are simultaneous or else they don't exist. And the sacred and the profane - and coca - it is within this order of things.""

""There are two Kallawayas,"" he goes on. ""At first they are together in their community, they are saying 'with this [coca] leaf and with this other leaf...', they are beginning to set up a world that is in the skies, that is Alaj Pacha. But I choose two of them to go on a journey. One goes to the inferno, the other to the sky. This one travels to Apolo, he sees the little girls in the coca plantations, gathers medicinal plants, reflects on the stupidity of a world that takes everything we have and sends us plastic. He's a sage. And the other one is too, but it is his lot to go to the miners, to go to rural areas... Uku Pacha is the Kallawaya that goes to the miners...It's the imprisoned Bra­zilian, the women in jail etc. And the descent into the mine is the descent to Uku Pacha as well. Symbolically.""

This Kallawaya finds the miners, a key political and economic force in Bo­livia, chewing coca undergroud and proclaiming that without coca there can be no mining, and without min­ing, no Bolivia. ""It is impossible to con­sider the history of the mines without coca"", says Lopez. ""And there had just occurred, when I started to shoot Inal Mama, a huge conflict in Huanuni [moving footage of which we also see during the film], where there was this massacre, between the unionised and the non-unionised miners. A fight between brothers; there were many deaths. ""And it interested me that this conflict could reach such a level, and in a place that was that was marked out as coca territory, because it's mining territory.""

He goes on to relate how in 1983-4 the MNR (Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario) ""took the mining heart out of the economy, came out with Decree 21060, and sacked all the miners. And those miners were the ones who went to Chapare. And their children are the cocaleros. It's a very dense history. And in a country that's very...intricate in these respects. The past acts in the present in a very particular way.""

Lopez has chosen to create this intri­cate picture (of ""a society that is so complicated, so jumbled, so interwo­ven, so contradictory, so ungovernable... "") through ""an urban opera, of the street...very much related to the groups and gangs that I already knew in El Alto and the Laderas."" As such, much of the narrative is told or enhanced by the film's original soundtrack, mixing angry rock with traditional instruments and rhythms, plus a gorgeous chorus.

Lopez hopes that Inal Mama can reach a much wider audience ""in Eu­rope and North America, where you say ""coca"" and the only perception is of a packet, a mirror, lines, a hundred dollars to sniff: this is coca. The plant doesn't exist, the cultures of coca don't exist.""

He thinks that the critics in the Bolivian press who wrote about Inal Mama were ""quite accurate"" when they said that ""it's not a documentary that registers a reality, with an off-screen narrator who explains this reality to you - no, it's loaded, it's woven together. Okay. This is exactly what the coca leaf does. The coca leaf sets things up, relates, conflicts, posits simultaneously the most prominent aspects of indigenous culture. And at the same time it posits the con­text of penalisation, of prohibition, of disqualification, of degradation, of humiliation...""

Forget Christmas: it's January. Which, in the Bolivian calendar at least, means it's time both for the Alasita Festival ('Alasita' thought to be derived from an Aymara word meaning 'to buy for one­self) and for the Ekeko to take centre stage. He's like Santa Claus- he has the same rosy cheeks, the same air of jolliness, and (often) a big round belly like a bowlful of jelly - but instead of wearing all red, he dons a llama-wool hat and miniature objects hang from his body.

The Alasita Festival - also known as the Miniature Festival - has the Ekeko as its symbolic figure. Loaded with money, food and other objects, he also carries the desire of those who hope that the miniature objects they hang on him will become real as the year goes on. For example, if you hang a small plastic car from your Ekeko figure, you hope to get your hands on a life-size model later in the year; likewise, hang a small box of matches from the Ekeko and you just might have the fortune to get a slightly larger version before the year's end. Every year at midday on the 24th January, tributes are made to the Ekeko in various parts of the city.

The festival finds its beginnings in the pre-Hispanic period, when the Ay­mara god Ekeko (also known as the 'Thunupa') also become known as the 'god of abundance/prosperity'. The festival gained success and recognition in colonial society from 1782 onwards, the year in which the festival's official day of celebration was first established by Sebastian Segurola, a Spaniard who succeeded in defending La Paz from an indigenous siege. Today it is regarded as one of the most important folkloric festivals in Bolivia.

This year sees the opening of an exhibi­tion entitled ' Las Alasitas: traditions of La Paz, in miniature', which features miniature handicrafts and Ekeko figures belonging to various collections of museums local to La Paz. The exhibi­tion, organised by the Union of Local Museums, opens on Friday21st January in the Temporary Exhibition Room of the Museo Costumbrista Municipal 'Juan de Vargas' (see Cultural Calendar, pi 6); it will also feature various prizewinning works from the Alasita Festival alongside works that have won local competitions in previous years.

According to Daniela Guzman, the head of the Union of Local Museums, many of the Ekeko figures were made anonymously; most of them date from the second half of the twentieth century, and some as far back as the Thirties. The handmade figures of this rather peculiar character - over thirty in total-were made using different techniques and materials, some using plasterwork, some carved from wood, and others made using metals such as silver or copper.

The exhibition will be available for viewing until the 20th February, and if you're fortunate enough to be in La Paz during the Alasitas Festival, make sure to buy yourself an Ekeko figure complete with plastic cars, miniature matchboxes, or little copies of the Bolivian Express, and you just might be lucky enough to get what you want this January.