Akulliku (Variation on Discourse of a decent man) - Wiener Festwochen

In an official banquet in Bogota, when visiting Colombia as President of the United States, Ronald Reagan said he was happy to be in La Paz. A famous Spanish musical duo, when on tour in Colombia, greeted the audience by saying: Good evening BO LI VI A! In the same way, in Austria, an international guest expert said: Welcome to the Convention of cocaine instead of saying the Vienna Convention. Within the framework of the 56th session of the Commission on Narcotic Drugs, held on the 11th March 2013, in Vienna, Bolivian President Evo Morales insisted that coca was not cocaine but a sacred plant used by indigenous people in the continent for thousands of years. Evo Morales celebrated the support towards the traditional consumption of coca leaf from the international community, and interpreted this as a victory against imperialism, nevertheless the UN pointed out that it remains a controlled substance. Morales, top leader of the coca growers in the Chapare region, led an event in Cochabamba and La Paz to celebrate that Bolivia will return to the 1961 antidrug Convention with an exception to be applied only to his country on chewing coca or Akulliku.

 

Akulliku is a variation on Discourse of a Decent Man, which premiered as a lecture performance in Brussels in 2011, and then as a theatre piece in Medellin in 2012. The images used in this piece, were obtained during a journey that Heidi Abderhalden and Pierre Henri Magnin made to the coca plantations of the region of Cochabamba in Bolivia, where the Bolivian leader, Evo Morales, is originally from.