Silvia

Un Diablo del Carnaval de Oruro

So I woke up Monday morning to Silvia and Nico screaming at each other--I guess Nico didn't even say hello to her, his keys are still lost, and a variety of other things. It's funny to be in Bolivia living with a spoiled art student. Although we're getting along: he brought me a really good salteña today (a Bolivian empanada with vegetables) which I'm pretty sure a) was one of the best things I've ever eaten and b) fairly close to vegetarian.

Then last night I sat in on the meeting of her research collective. Usually it's in the living room but she hurt her knee (something with a bus in Bogotá, she's in bed for a week) so we had the session in her bedroom. We sat surrounding her bed, and she just talked and talked while chewing mountains of coca leaves and smoking cigarettes--she constantly uses the words jodida, huevada, and carajo to mean great, which is even better when you remember that she's a famous distinguished professor her 60s.

First she explained all about this politics and performance conference she went to in Colombia, which seemed pretty wild and intense, especially the performances: a woman played a symphony with an instrument attached to her vagina, while another snorted cocaine onstage as the culmination of her performance. Silvia recounted this in very colorful detail. Then she announced that she had the idea in Colombia for the group to organize a big five-day conference called Coca Sin Fronteras, to combat Evo's "chauvinistic nationalism." She wants the conference to be at the end of october, so she delegated tasks to the research collective . She also wants them to do a graffiti project to promote it, with a tag for the collective. (She excitedly-yet-firmly gave them a huge amount of work, which made me stop salivating and remember the downside of the mentor-protege relationship for at least 30 seconds.) During all this she was intermittently passing books around and handing back papers and commenting on them, as well as chewing the coca and smoking.

They are all working on Sociology of the Image, which Silvia is convinced is the wave of the future but I'm a little fuzzy on still. Right now they're working on doing oral histories of diablos, these indigenous dancers who do these devil dances at carnavals all over and appear in early colonial art. So the students are going out and interviewing the diablos, but then they complain that they are expected to get drunk and dance with them. I guess Silvia also wants the conference to feature diablos from all over. The students seem very brilliant and friendly. Silvia invited me to do some kind of ceremony with them this Saturday, so I will definitely report.

Silvia was not impressed with my cooking (I mixed rice and quinoa, which in retrospect was a bad idea and really didn't taste very good, but there was just a little bit of quinoa left--she was pretty horrified by that), but she is going to teach me once she gets better. A few days ago she said "you're going to become like a daughter to me,"which was nice. She's pretty stressed out right now for the moment, with the injury, Nico, and the conference, and she's also had a parade of guests and students coming through, but I'm hoping things will settle down at some point and I can have more of a real conversation with her. In the meantime, I'm getting a lot of writing done, preparing to go to the archives, and still exploring the city. I'll post more pictures soon.