Quico Bello

Enrique Bello – the more common spelling of his pseudonym – Kiko. During the rule of Salvador Allende, he took an active part in Chile's artistic and political life – director of the famous Chilean University TV Channel 9, actor, musician. He knew Pablo Neruda, Violeta Parra, Allen Ginsberg. After the coup d'état, he and his wife Ana María Rojas were in exile in Poland. He lived in Warsaw, where he worked for Polish television, then in Kraków. There, as a lecturer at the Jagiellonian University, he founded the group El Sur with his wife and a group of students. Musical and theatrical work under his direction was a constitutive experience for the young people. He came to Węgajty with the group El Sur in the first half of the 1980s. Getting to know Wacław and Erdmute Sobaszek and Węgajty was a breakthrough in El Sur's work. It involved the discovery that the strength they were looking for in Andean culture could be found in a Warmian barn. Wacław Sobaszek, in turn, described Bello's influence on the work carried out in Węgajty with the words: "He left traces in the landscape". In Węgajty, Quico taught actors Andean highlander dances and body work. For Wacław and Erdmute Sobaszek, he was an expert in theatre work. After returning to Chile with his wife and daughters, he taught social animation at a school for culture managers. He shared the effects of his work with Indians with the Węgajty Theatre during a meeting in Czechowice-Dziedzice when he briefly visited Poland. He died in 2016.