There is an old Aymara folktale about two thieves, a Fox and a Monkey. Throughout their adventures, the Fox falls prey to the Monkey’s many ruses, often leading him close to death. One night a very angry Fox, fed up with his partner’s tricks, finds the Monkey on a riverbank, under the moonlight, eating cheese. The Monkey gives the Fox the rest of his cheese, which he quickly eats. When asked where he stole the cheese from, the Monkey points to the moon’s reflection in the water and says, ‘There's the rest of the cheese, brother.’ And the Fox, always taking the Monkey at his word and always hungry for more (SPOILER ALERT!) dives into the river and drowns.
Light is a funny thing. It is often associated with the security and safety of what is known. An illuminated environment is one we can understand, while a lack of light can be menacing – just ask any miner working in the mountains of Oruro and Potosí. But light is also playful, as anyone who has traversed the Salar de Uyuni can attest, particularly when there is a smooth sheen of water covering the white expanse with glitter and glare.
A common use for the word or idea of ‘light’ is to bring forth something. Perhaps the most prevalent use is in the expression ‘to shine a light on’, or to reveal details or the truth.And in a much more intimate way, ‘dar a luz’ is the common way to say ‘to give birth’ in Spanish.
As in the case of the Fox and the Monkey, light can play tricks. It can provide false truth, it can fool the eye. In our folktale, the Fox believed the moon reflected on the riverbed was not what it was, but that it was a desirable piece of cheese. Disastrous as this was for the Fox, these deceptions are what can make light fun. It is a complex force we both use and contend with, and we know the world would not be possible without it.
In this issue of Bolivian Express, we look at ‘light’ in a variety of ways, from the literal to the metaphorical. Our journalists took to the streets, cameras in hand, to capture the ways in which light dances with the landscape to create everyday visual spectacles. After all, photography is light, as many photographers told us. The same goes for cinema, whether delivered in a theatre on film or streamed to a laptop – light is the key component in the creation and dissemination of images. We looked at artists who are playing with light to create intense sensory experiences. And we learned from the miners and fishermen who spend unusual amounts of time doing their work in the cover of darkness.
As a metaphor, light is useful in the formation of phrases and the development of ideas (think: ‘see the light’). We wrote about various methods of enlightenment, both intellectual and spiritual, and also how convicts in Bolivian prisons are preparing for their lives ‘in the light of day’.
In his article In the Arms of the Moon Goddess, writer Nikolaus Cox outlines the importance the moon has on both the residents and visitors to Isla de la Luna, on Lake Titicaca. This is a place where different cultures for millennia have been finding solace, strength and meaning under the canopy of the moonlight. This island holds on its shores a history of light that is as profound as it is ancient.
Too bad for our friend the Fox that he did not see the moon for what it truly is.
But again, that is what makes light so interesting. In its role to clarify and reveal, sometimes it can only confound, confuse and amaze.
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Have you ever seen a colony of butterflies travelling? Or more specifically, have you witnessed their journey through the trees covering the lowlands of eastern Bolivia, filling the lush green canopy with all shades of contrasting colors? A fluttering mass of butterflies travelling together can flood the landscape with slight movements, making it seem to dance like nature’s most perfect flash mob. With the whistling wind as music, pollination in the wild can be one of the most sublime scenes Mother Earth can offer.
Chiquitania, in the eastern plains of Bolivia, is one of the most beautiful places to see butterflies, and if travelling by train you can see them up close. Or, if you visit the mountains of Tucabaca, you can take in butterflies that resemble flying flowers, reminding us of the power of nature.
Closer to the creature comforts of the city of Santa Cruz, however, the Güembé Biocenter is home to the largest mariposario in Bolivia. There you can experience the evolution of the butterfly, from egg to death, and witness different species in their natural habitat. Inside this huge natural space, colourful flowers enhance the view and fill the ambience with a sense of life. Above soar the butterflies, big and small, solid coloured and multicoloured, some flying as if hunting pollen, some in silence upon meeting with flowers. It is a place where one easily forgets about the good or bad things. Here, one is filled with the natural feeling of love for so much beauty in the air.
There are more than 3,000 species of butterflies in Bolivia. Among them is one of the most exotic and beautiful – and therefore the most expensive – in the world: the prepona. The xenágora, a member of the prepona family, is most beloved for its spots in the form of eyes that look like a three-dimensional picture. A prepona male in the European market can cost about US $400.00 while the female reaches $ 2,000.00. Although the most expensive butterflies are from India, Bolivian butterflies are among the best paid in the entomological world.
A trip to the mariposario is a quick reminder that a butterfly can inspire in many ways. The flapping of its wings, according to chaos theory, can cause a storm across the world, in what is called the butterfly effect. The Greeks thought that butterflies carried the soul between life and death, representing the last breath taken on earth. Others believe black butterflies are harbingers of death. And across cultures, butterflies remain near-mythical creatures serving as symbols of beauty for their light flight.
The butterfly is also a very strong spiritual symbol; it represents the need to accept death to be reborn. A butterfly is a caterpillar first, and then becomes a cocoon, locking itself in its world to finally release itself as a beautiful butterfly with wings to fly away. This is the representation of the resignation of one world, being reborn into another, a representation of freedom, of liberation, of rebirth.
One of the characteristics of life in Santa Cruz is how relaxed everything can be. Waking up early is just fine, as long as you do not neglect the late-afternoon coffee. A light life, in the sense of knowing how to enjoy the moment without arguments to argue, people take their chairs to the streets, gathering with neighbours for a bit of lazy fraternisation. Being in the mariposario at the Güembé Biocenter can offer the same sensibility. It provides an opportunity to maintain a state of being in harmony with the world.
The butterflies here, flying gracefully and showing beauty in their colours and shapes, no matter how strange, exotic, expensive, small or large, provide spiritual inspiration, a condition closely related to love. And that is what life is about, to love and heal oneself, to live in harmony, with friendship, with courage to leave the past and to dare to live a more powerful life.
Resting at the west of the city on the road to Porongo, Güembé Biocenter also provides pools, walking, lakes, islands, an orchid nursery, an aviary and a beautiful gazebo where one can feel the power of the wind and become part of the landscape. This place, built with the right energy, invites you to enjoy a special kind of life represented by the butterflies – one in harmony with oneself, and with others.
Photo Credit: Rodrigo Urzagasti
A Three-Pronged Exploration of Contemporary Bolivian Cinema, in Brief
It is a Tuesday afternoon and I am at La Paz’s opulent five-level shopping mall, MegaCenter, complete with bowling alley and ice skating rink. I enter through the living room – the ground-floor entrance, a showroom of leather and glass – and pace across the tiles through to the main atrium, past the Cadillac on display, past the ball pit, into the elevator. To the top floor, lightning-fast. Too high. Kiddy pool and Japanese steakhouse. One floor lower: food court. Pollos Copacabana, Subway, Burger King – ¡capitalistas! – and I find myself hustling past a labyrinth of metal dining sets to make it to my movie on time.
Where am I? A carpet of dizzying patterns but nobody’s walking on it. I feel a fiendish hunger for popcorn. Buttered or grape? I choose the norm, but the cashier throws a few grape kernels on top. Free sample. Glad she did.
Entering the theater, I step into a parallel dimension, far from brickhouse tiendas, wild dogs and car exhaust, into a gargantuan hall filled with pillow-soft, throne-like seats. The surround-sound system nearly explodes my eardrums as the doldrum American film, Escalofrios, starts up. One hour and 39 minutes later, I re-emerge, eyes blinded by the fluorescent lights. Entertained, but mostly confused at myself for piddling my life away in this big-budget excuse for product placement. Only later do I find out that Escalofrios – known in the US as Goosebumps – is being played in more Bolivian theaters than any other movie. Even any Bolivian movie.
From the teleférico, I see the whole of this city, situated in its bowl-shaped valley. I peer down on Cinemateca Boliviana, which is showing Bolivia’s own big-budget films, such as Boqueron, El Cuarto and Norte Estrecho. I see that this city is infinitely more important than its 25bs, empty-theater-going, American blockbuster experience.
Cinemateca Boliviana, Sopocachi. Sinking into large, regal seats of deep red, we await the picture. As the first previews start to roll in our modern amphitheater, I catapult the first fistful of popcorn into my mouth and strap in for the spectating.
Here, I bear witness to award-winning Bolivian cinema. Set primarily in the US state of Virginia, the Bolivian-cast, Bolivian-directed film Norte Estrecho represents the direction that Bolivian cinema has moved toward in the past few years. With its heart-tugging, orchestral soundtrack and linear, emotional plot, the film echoes a Western filmmaking tradition, but its message – the strife and success of Latin American immigrants living in the United States – is presented as uniquely Bolivian. In this way it is a quintessential reflection of Cinemateca Boliviana's foremost goal: the presentation and preservation of Bolivian cinema.
With equipment and facilities funded, surprisingly, in large part by China, Cinemateca Boliviana supports contemporary Bolivian cinema. It also showcases films from across Latin America, as seen with its recent Muestra de Cine Latinamericano. Cinemateca Boliviana aims to be una casa de cultura: It also offers creative workshops, a library, and a lecture series.
In the words of Claudio Sanchez, director of programming at Cinemateca, ‘Cinema is a production of messages.’ In effect, Escalofrios and Boqueron – a historic drama set during the time of Bolivia's Chaco War – provide the viewer with vastly different messages. A historically knowledgeable Bolivian watching Boqueron, and a foreigner watching it without understanding its cultural context, will see the film – and thus receive its message – differently. Differently, too, will the American tourist who sees Escalofrios – based on an American book series – relate to it than a Bolivian of the same age sitting next to them in MegaCenter.
I have been told that Sergio Pinedo Grillo’s Procrastinación is ‘a weird film.’ But I am utterly unprepared for the visual and audial madhouse that awaits me: shrieking laughing crashing, quietude calm, running destruction dancing.
‘I played around’, Pinedo, the film’s director, tells me. ‘I played with the actors, I played with the footage – edited it randomly, putting this here, this there.’ He adds: ‘I wanted this film to be sin guía’ – without precedent and or conventional filmmaking techniques. Similarly experimental, albeit directed with an emphasis on social, rather than artistic, change is Diego Mondaca’s Ciudadela, which explores the lives of inmates in La Paz’s San Pedro prison.
About the themes in his documentary/visual poem, Mondaca declares: ‘Any poetic work is a social work, and any social work is a poetic work.’ Such films, by Mondaca and his contemporaries, are currently on display in Buenos Aires, in a festival dedicated specifically to showcase innovative, contemporary Bolivian film.
For this markedly rural country, the Bolivian film industry exists as a result of urban socio-economic growth and the influence of Western media. But, for Cinemateca Boliviana and the many Bolivian directors in constant pursuit of new filmmaking techniques and uniquely Bolivian messages, the world of Bolivian film is a rapidly expanding artistic community.
It is now up to the next generation of Bolivian filmmakers to address the questions and problems that Bolivians face, one of which can be seen in the five-story capitalistic multiplex so expensive that many cannot afford it, so Westernized that all of the films shown there are from the US. Yet, through MegaCenter, Cinemateca Boliviana, the Internet, and Bolivia’s own film festivals, the filmmaking industry in this country will only continue to grow. I can only hope that the trend of grape-flavored popcorn does the same.
Photo Credit: JQ Cooley
The faces behind the camera
Photography is all about light. The meaning of the term itself, ‘drawing with light’, reveals the importance of light in this artform. Light is what makes a photo.
Cristina Machicado, an amateur photographer who lives in La Paz, unearths a cardboard box the size of a microwave from a pile of objects stored in her darkroom. The box has a small hole punctured on the bottom. Cristina and her photographer friends used to take it around streets in the city to teach people how a camera functions.
‘The interior of this cardboard box is like the interior of a camera,’ Cristina explained, as I put the box on my head, making sure the outside light doesn’t filter in. I looked in front of me and I started to see shadows of a house. I was not, as I suspected, seeing through it. What I was seeing was upside down and it wasn’t the image of something I had in front of me, but of the house right behind me.
‘On the back of your head there is a tiny, almost invisible, hole through which light can enter,’ Cristina continues. ‘It’s like the lens of a camera. Light comes in through this aperture and projects an upside down image of what the camera is pointing at. This image is then impressed on the film or the digital sensor of the camera and what we call a photograph is the end result’. Voila!
But the role of light in photography cannot be reduced to the simple mechanism of taking a photo. Light is something a photographer always has in mind while shooting. Tony Suarez is a photographer based in La Paz, who worked for 22 years for Time Inc. He talks about light as a component that captures someone’s attention all of a sudden. ‘One day you find yourself walking down a familiar road, when suddenly you notice something you had never seen before,’ he explains. ‘A particular light illuminates you.’ For him, light is inspirational.
For the last five years, Tony has been waking up every morning to take photos of Illimani from his bedroom window. ‘Illimani is our guardian, a protector that keeps an eye on us all the time,’ he says. Despite its constant presence, every single shot Tony has captured of the peak is different from the others because of the ever-changing game between lights and clouds around it. When the sky is crystal clear, Tony thinks it is less interesting.
China Martinez, who gives photography classes in La Paz, talks about light with a different focus. She used to work as a photojournalist, whereas now she only works in her studio. ‘Shooting in the street is completely different from shooting with artificial lighting,’ China says, ‘and a photographer has to learn how to deal with light in different scenarios.’
With street photography, before shooting you have to consider what time of the day it is and what kind of light you are working with. In La Paz, for example, because of the altitude, light is really bright and sharp mostly at midday and photographers have to work bearing this in mind. In order to capture a moment, the photographer has to adjust the camera according to the available light of that instant. The light becomes a subject as much as anything else.
In a studio, photographers have full control over the illumination. They can present their subjects and play with the light in as many ways as they want. ‘It is crazy,” China tells me, ‘but light in a studio also changes the behaviour of a person.’ As soon as people are in the setting of the shoot, she explains, they start to act less spontaneous – unless they are professional models and feel comfortable in the spotlight; or children, who are not much affected by the change of light or setting.
Even though photographers work with light, they find it challenging to explain the importance of light in their artwork. When I asked Camila Molina, who studied photography in Santiago, Chile, she exclaimed, ‘What a difficult question!’ Light is at the heart of a picture, but Camila cannot think of light without thinking about composition.
Camila believes that using an analogue camera teaches you how to control light better than using a digital one. Of course, without the possibility of seeing your photos immediately after you have taken them, it is impossible to know if you captured the right exposure. ‘After making mistakes, you learn to play with the settings,’ she says.
Katyussa Veiga is a self-taught Brazilian photographer, who learned how to use a camera when she arrived in Bolivia 4 years ago. ‘I love the materiality of things,’ she admits. ‘For this reason, I only work with analogue photography’. Katyussa’s camera does not have a photometer (the instrument that measures light and helps to adjust the three commands of a camera – speed, aperture and ISO). Without the photometer, Katyussa studies the light around her to mentally calculate which settings she has to change. ‘When I am holding my camera, I am thinking all the time,’ she explains.
Rather than simply capturing moments with her camera, Katyussa wants to tell a story. She likes to work with double exposures, a technique that allows you to shoot twice, but obtain only one photo. This is how she manages to create ‘micro-narratives’ that are contained in a single image. There is a lot going on in her shots, thanks to this peculiar technique that is usually associated with analogue photography. ‘Photography,’ Katyussa believes, ‘is the discovery of one’s own sight, one’s own way to tell stories.’
Over the past few years, photography has been made accessible to almost anyone with a smart phone. Does this mean almost anyone can become a photographer? All of the artists I interviewed said the same thing about this phenomenon: ‘It’s awesome.’ Still, professional photographers are easily recognisable, not because of the equipment they use – after all, it is not the camera that makes the photographer – but because of the twinkle in their eyes whenever they say that, for them, photography is a lifestyle.
Photos by: Anna Bellettato
Katyussa Vega
Tony Suarez
Camila Molina
Cristina Machicado
China Martinez
