Weird or Wonderful

Week 50 : Notes

This programme oscillates between the weird and the wonderful, it might be one or the other or both at the same time, the choice lies in the eye of the beholder.

Once high-mountain cooks, the cholitas, Bolivian Aymara indigenous women, climb high mountains in their traditional garments. It consists of a top skirt, of up to ten underskirts, a shawl and their typical bowler hat, brought into the country by British railway workers in the nineteenth century. Adnan Oktar, notorious Turkish religious cult leader, creationist and conspiracy-theory advocate, was sentenced to 1075 years in prison in 2021 on charges of sexual abuse, forming a criminal enterprise and financial fraud. The sapeuse are the female counterparts of the sapeurs, a Congolese subculture movement who do a reboot of the elegance in fashion of the French and Belgian dandies of the colonial past. True to the spiritual roots of the Drukpa lineage, a thousand year old Buddhist tradition, the Kung Fu nuns see their calling in fighting for gender equality, environmentally-friendly ways of living and respect for all living beings. Abigail Goldman, a US-American investigator and former newspaper reporter creates miniature dioramas of crime scenes, while US-American artists  Lori Nix and Kathleen Gerber build and photograph dioramas of a dystopian, deserted world after mankind is gone. 85 years old US-American Ernestine Shepherd is a record-holding bodybuilder, who teaches exercise classes for seniors and works as a personal trainer. Tango dancing keeps Anna del Priore in good spirit and good health. She and her 105 years old sister survived Covid-19, a wonderfully optimistic outlook in these unsettled and unsettling times.