Picture this: You are standing in a wooden tower, 15 meters above the green pampas soil beneath you. Bare toes, a flower dress, the wind tickling your chin. From south and east, from above, north and west, the imperious sun is making the never-ending flat landscape shine.
And a festival occurring all around you.
Vamos arriba, Argentina.
It is carnival. It is Un Mundo Feliz!
In front there is a little forest full of people. A tree tunnel made of bamboo leads the curious in, marking the entrance, it is decorated with flags hanging in blue, red and green, with stalks of grass called fox tail, it is fluffy and silky, forming its sides. There are classes of yoga, runcing and gardening in these woods, kids are running in between, someone is just chattering, watching, sitting on low chairs of hay. There are families and lovers in colorful trousers selling chocolate and postcards, the kids, some stripped for clothes and painted dark of clay in their cheerful faces, are giggling their way around, up in a massive playing-net hanging in the trees, down again, they don’t stop, never, never, cause time is non-existent and this moment eternal.
And then there is music. Within eyeshot from your tower, to the right for a circle-formed vegetable garden, there is a stage. A man with curly dark hair and a guitar is singing his songs, it is all so delicate. His listeners, some hundreds they must be, are sitting close in the grass under a blue textile making the sun rays falling soft on their skin.
This is the festival Un Mundo Feliz, or at least a fragment of it. Every summer, in the Southern Hemisphere that is, the green festival promoting sustainability takes place at the education center called Quinta Esencia, a four hours car drive south of Buenos Aires. The center is managed of the NGO Amartya, which corporate with Kulturstudier offering various experience weeks for the students during the semester. Many of the same people are also doing this festival, which is non-profit based on volunteers. I volunteered helping building and making numerous videos in front of the arrangement, and during the festival I did the photos not leave my camera alone for a moment. All together around 16 students from Kulturstudier went to the festival, a handful helping with construction some days before the kick-off, one performing her songs during, and the rest enjoying. “Why on earth are there so many Norwegians and Danes here? the Argentinians kept on asking themselves.
Three grand days of music, art and sustainability went by, a whole range of different classes to try out, with an intense presence of weather, in all forms. When the latest concerts the last night were canceled due to one of those strong pampas winds, they come hurried with lots of rain and cooler air, people fled to their carpets. However, one hour later, when the fireflies again lighted up the pampas and the orchestra of frogs returned to their seats as the rain was gone, then, the magic happened. So many mundofelizianos around a massive bone-fire, there were drummers, flutists, dancers with transparent veils, artists singing for hours and hours into the night, into the fire, people humming along.
América Latina, querida!
What a blast! Thank you so much to everyone who made this festival, it was all very special, a true adventure. Thank you for sharing it with me.
Beso,
Hilda
Ps. If you want to read more about the festival or see all of my 500 pictures (hehehe), take a look in the albums of the festivals fanpage on Facebook.
https://www.facebook.com/unmundofeliz/?fref=ts
Read more about Kulturstudiers experience week at the Argentinean pampas here.
http://www.kulturstudier.com/places/argentina/experience-the-argentinean-pampas-at-quinta-esencia/
