ALTHOUGH separated by a telephone line “Piki” Figueroa’s calm and eloquent yet emotionally charged take on art, politics and the Bolivarian process is utterly compelling.

His band’s name Bituaya is a generic one for the Venezuelan root vegetables “you make soup with,” he tells me and it’s an apt summation of the band’s quest for the ancestral soul of the continent they call by its native name of Abiayala.

The band evolved in the Tiuna el Fuerte (“Fort”) political and cultural collective in the working-class neighbourhood of El Valle in Caracas. 

Their mission statement cannot be clearer. Bituaya is “a collective of collectives, a refuge, an embassy that gives asylum to rebellious youth, that resists domestication and the anti-cultural offensive but it is not a university or athenaeum.” 

Bituaya’s mission began in 2005 with the recycling of an abandoned car park where two motorways diverge. 

Today it’s a centre for street-art workshops, music lessons, theatre, film, dance and circus arts, all housed imaginatively in shipping containers that have gained international recognition and won prestigious architectural awards in countries as far apart as Spain, Ecuador and China.

None of the five members of Bituaya are politically affiliated, says Figueroa. Their militancy is guided by the needs of a community which progressively develops its own skills in self-government but operates in total support of, and in harmony with, the fundamental goals of the revolution. Hugo Chavez is their spiritual mentor.

“The community has an accumulated political experience of six generations of daily oppression,” he explains, “so levels of consciousness as well as self-criticism are very high.”  

Their lyrics — delivered to the mesmerising, melodious rhythms of cumbia, reggae, salsa and reggaeton — would have stunned Vladimir Mayakovsky or Woody Guthrie. 

“Catch the drift, we are the new era/Abiayala will sock it to the gringos/ We were last but will be first,” they sing in Alerta (Warning). 

In Oye Mi Swin (Listen to my Swing) they demand: “Listen to my swing, listen to my song, listen mate/the revolution — watch out!— isn’t a business.” 

Later in the number they get even more hard-hitting: “You’re the padlocks, we’re the keys… for you socialism is a pickup truck/chicks with a pair of tits/respect, women must be respected.”

For Figueroa, all art is political: “When a song asks you to shake your arse, speaks of love or seduction, its banality peddles consumerism. A song can help transform society for the better or for worse.”

Bituaya, he says, “take their message predominantly into public spaces, squares within easy access of ordinary people with music delivering potent and empowering messages, which attempts to win arguments and advance the common cause of socialism.” 

As one of their raps has it: “Walking through the neighbourhood I carry on co-operating/fighting, supporting, shouting/to stop confusion, so wake up!” 

Bituaya plan to expand their activities to include neighbourhood bars where local people congregate in the evenings. For them, “music is a production and employment space” that includes hotels and restaurants and accordingly they’re mapping out the collective’s development for the next 10 years to take this into account.

In 2012 Bituaya were hosted by community organisations in the multi-cultural township of St Denis in Paris’s suburban “red belt” outskirts — an experience that instigated international networking to self-produce and market their own music as well as that of French and Brazilian artists who share their ideals.

They’ve just finished dates in Britain and they’re currently touring Spain, France — they play the Fete de l’Humanite this weekend — and Belgium and doubtless that will further develop “all the necessary skills within the communities themselves.”

Back in Venezuela, however, the urban areas — singled out as key battlegrounds by the counter-revolutionaries — have been damagingly disrupted and “consequently experienced a decline in outright support for the revolution,” according to Figueroa.

But, not discouraged, the Tiuna el Fuerte collective is developing symbiotic links to the rural producers to “secure food sovereignty and plan ahead,” he explains matter-of-factly. “The politicisation in the countryside has remained far stronger because it has not been put under much pressure so far,” he stresses.

That politicisation resonates with the crystal clarity of Bituaya’s message opposing social injustice and exploitation on their song Un Solo Corazon, Venezuela (One Heart Alone, Venezuela): “In this land of mine an original idea is taking shape/No — to everything for the few,/Yes — to everything for the many.” 

• For more details on Bituaya, visit issuu.com/mutealba/docs/tiunacur