Masks at the National Museum of Ethnography and Folklore in La Paz

*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.

This celebration, renewal and collision with the past and with the indians’ own identity, breaks down everyday order and routine to establish the magic dimension, the exception and the anomaly.  An explosion of vitality, abundance and liberty demolishes everyday slavery and misery.  But the festive chaos which transports one to the anomalous and to the sacred, simultaneously causes the return to profane normality.  Just when the disorder and confusion reach the state of paroxysm, when everything is agitated and intermixed indiscrimanently, the celebration is over.  The bands all play at the same time in deafening competition, the dancers can no longer hold themselves up, and all distinctions between groups, musicians, dancers and sexes are erased.  It is the kacharpaya, the limit of disorder and cataclysm, which signals the return to routine.      

To Cover in Order to Uncover, by Fernando Montes in Masks of the Bolivian Andes, Photographs:  Peter McFarren, Sixto Choque, Editorial Quipos and BancoMercantil

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