AA Visiting School El Alto

Portable Cholets

As you walk in the streets of La Paz, you immediately understand that there is a mystic feeling in paceños. There is a practical and a sacred sense in all the things they do: the most ordinary routines can be naturally transformed into unique spiritual happenings. The VS El Alto will persist on questioning notions of identity, folklore and contemporary rituals translated into architecture.

If last year the VS investigated the masks, the costumes and the choreography of an actual Bolivian traditional dance – the Diablada – in the 2019 edition we will craft our own characters, to construct a layered performance, dealing both with popular myths and the urban fabric morphology. Students will thoroughly experience Freddy Mamani's cholets, as built examples of the symbiosis among religion, politics, Pop and popular culture. Their compositional and aesthetic features are indeed grounded into the symbolism of indigenous folkloric dances and textiles: here demons, dragons and angels, together with real-world creatures like bears and owls not only populate the parades, but also dictate the geometrical abstract motifs of the facades and the proportions of ornamental details within the interiors.

We will analyze and absorb El Alto's contaminated visual languages – privileged witnesses of the syncretism between Andean paganism and Catholic instances - to extract design principles and spatial hierarchies, that enable a direct interplay of scale between architecture and the human body.
Indeed, we will record the memories of these identitarian architectural compounds, consciously adopting dysfunctional procedures to track back the symbolic items that inspired them. El Alto's colourful buildings will become again costumes, masked characters with anthropomorphic and animalistic lineaments to dynamically inhabit the streets of La Paz – wearable and portable Cholets