Mate is a medium that has sparked countless conversations, no matter where you come from. In my culture, mate is always a shared moment that extends the conversation and deepens connections.
I am here to talk about that: how to create mediums in space to guide, archive, and share conversations, and what it means to view conversation as a material in itself.
As Melissa Febos writes in her book In Praise of Navel Gazing, “Don’t tell me that the experiences of a vast majority of our planet’s human population are marginal, are not relevant, are not political. Don’t tell me that you think there’s not enough room for another story about sexual abuse, motherhood, or racism. The only way to make room is to drag all our stories into that room. That’s how it gets bigger.”
For me, that is the essence of my research: how to “drag our stories into a room.” The big question is how to do that, and that’s where my methodology comes in—to guide, archive, and share conversations in spaces.
I have always gathered information and new perspectives through conversations—with friends, colleagues, a taxi driver, and others. This is how I have come to understand the world and shape my ideals. I want to use conversation as my source material to discuss different issues, to feel what is happening somewhere, or simply to listen to people’s experiences.
Definition of conversation: “A talk, between two or more people, in which news and ideas are exchanged.”
For me, the artistic act and challenge lie in the idea of how to archive these conversations, using the archive as a political platform that empowers and acknowledges the words spoken. Jean-Yves Jouannais writes that “the archive has established itself as an artistic medium capable of opening new possibilities for experimentation.”
The question then becomes how to use space as a stage to hold these conversations, each with its own characteristics depending on the topic. Staging mediums will help me guide and preserve these dialogues, turning the act of conversation into a material that informs around a topic, and experiment how to share this moment between two or more people.
The Argentinian artist Daniel Zelko, in his work Reunión, describes his process:
"Walking aimlessly through cities, towns, and rural communities of Latin America, I come across people. I invite them to write a few poems. We spend time together, often for several days, and at a certain point, they dictate to me, and I act as their scribe. The next day, the poems are printed in zines. The writer reads them aloud to their neighbors in a gathering at their home. They give away their books. The second part of the project extends the first acts to other places. The writers get spokespeople who read their poems aloud. Initially, in an encounter, spoken word becomes written word. In the end, the poems enable an encounter where the written word becomes oral once again. Poems exist, at last, between two people instead of two pages."
His work is an inspiration for my research—specifically how he unites different stories and shares them with the same community, while also presenting them in a performative way to an external audience.
This semester, I will be experimenting with various ways of archiving conversations around different themes, using staged settings as my medium. These settings will help guide and create safe spaces for conversations, and will explore how to present them to an external audience.
Tabu and safe
THe idea of creating somthing that makes tou uncorfortable but in the same tameit makes you feel compleatily safe is the focun on my reaseachar.
We weakive that because something is tabu is not safe to talk about it, what I want is that it because safe to talk and more you talk about it more safe it becaumes. more we talk about somth9ng that makes us uncomfortable lest inconfortabe it bexausmes and more we can realete to it untherstand it and make it tolerable. is something is tabu I like to put it more in the table I like to talk about it for hours non stop until it because a suor safe water to dive in and feel like a safe scace to confront and be around it.
The existence of the soul in Caio - Hernán Casciari
Zacarias and I drink mate. All the time. At any time. The times we were about to separate, the times a new son came home, when he was fired from his job, when Argentina won the World Cup, when the twin towers fell down. When mom died...
Between Zacarías and I there were days without kissing in the morning, weeks without speaking to each other, months without even a haircut, long years without a peso in our pockets. But there was never a single day in our marriage without him or me sitting in silence drinking mate.
Mate is not a drink, hearts from another neighborhood. Well, it is. It's a liquid and it goes in your mouth. But it is not a drink. In this country nobody drinks mate because they are thirsty. It is rather a habit, like scratching. Mate is exactly the opposite of television. It makes you talk if you are with someone, and it makes you think when you are alone. When someone comes to your house the first sentence is “hello” and the second one is “some mate?
This happens in every house. In those of the rich and those of the poor. It happens between chatty and gossipy women, and it happens between serious or immature men. It happens among old people in a nursing home and among teenagers while they are studying or taking drugs. It is the only thing that parents and children share without arguing or getting in each other's faces. Peronists and radicals drink mate without asking questions. In summer and in winter. It is the only thing in which the victims and the executioners are alike. The good ones and the sons of bitches.
When you meet someone for the first time, you drink some mates. People ask, when there is no trust:
-Sweet or bitter? The other answers:
-Whatever you drink.
I always write to you with my mate next to the keyboard. I read the comments with my mate next to me. The keyboards in Argentina and Uruguay have the letters full of yerba. Yerba is the only thing that is always there, in every house. Always. With inflation, with hunger, with military, with democracy, with any of our pests and eternal curses. And if one day there is no yerba, a neighbor has it and gives it to you. Yerba is not denied to anyone. Not even to old Monforte.
This is the only country in the world where the decision to stop being a boy and start being a man happens on a particular day. No long pants, circumcision, college or living away from parents. Here we start to be big the day we feel the need to drink mate alone for the first time. It is not by chance. It is not by chance. The day a kid puts the kettle on and drinks his first mate without anyone at home, at that minute, is because he has discovered that he has a soul. Either he's scared to death, or he's dead in love, or something: but it's not just any day.
End
Flufy space whit a very difficult subjet.
Contrast betwin tabu and difficult conversations and difficult topics of conversations.
Wamr that invite the difficult topics to be aproiched in a safes way.
Creating communities
Comming tohuether in times of crisis.
Archiving conversations
Showing to a external audience.
Art as a collective practice.
—Dani Zelko
The Procedure
Some practices and formal decisions that have constituted the way Reunión works
I travel to cities, towns, borders and Indigenous lands to meet people and communities. I invite them to make a book through a process in which words are transmuted from oral to written and from spoken to read as they traverse bodies and spaces. People speak to me and I write their words verbatim by hand. Each time they pause to inhale, I start a new line, creating a new verse. Recording is forbidden. In the following days, we read the text together and reach a final version that is then typed and made into a book. The full texts are read aloud by the participants in public events. Then the books begin to circulate: half the copies are distributed by communities in their own territories and half the copies are distributed elsewhere. Free digital and audiobooks are made available online. Each book necessitates its own distribution that accounts for the specificity of its territory and context, the political, social, cultural and ethical intentions of those involved, and the material conditions of the people they need to reach.
A brief history of Reunión:
First Seasons (2015 - 2017)
At the beginning of this project, I traveled aimlessly and invited random people to participate in Reunión. The publications took the form of zines that were printed with my backpack printer, a small backpack with a desktop printer inside. Each zine contained around 16 pages that featured the words of one participant. Once the zine was printed, neighbors, family members, and friends were invited to a public event where each participant read the full text while seated in a circle of nine chairs. Everyone who came to listen received a zine as a gift. Later that same act was extended to other places, where the poems were read by spokespersons: people who lent their bodies to read the poems of an absent person in a circle of nine chairs. During this phase the procedure was consolidated: “At first, in an encounter, spoken word is transformed into written word. In the end, the poems make possible a get-together in which word becomes oral. The poems are happy: they are at last between two persons instead of two pages.”
Over this period, 18 zines were created by participants aged 8 - 73 in different parts of Argentina, Bolivia, Cuba, Guatemala, Mexico and Paraguay: Akim Chan Kayún Mendez, Andrés Neuman, Gerson “Montaña” Rodriguez Irala, Rigo, Patricia Bautista Roa, Edson Trujillo, Melina Abigail Nuñez, Vicente Grandos, Juana Petzey, José Luis “Crespo” Jacobino, Lucía Emilia Gomez Sheng, Pirge, Cath, Miguel, Freda Gonzalez Portieles, Luis Ángel, Francois Dave Junior, and Carina Juarez. Carina Juarez.
Urgent Editions (2017 - present)
In 2017 Reunión ceased to move at random and started to work among communities and people that have been constructed as public enemies, suffering explicit violence like murder, eviction, criminalization, stigmatization.
In this current ongoing phase, Reunión intervenes in concrete moments of grief and tension, where the workings of the powers-that-be collide with the potency of resistances.
The procedure becomes available to those who need it. The encounters open a shared temporality for awareness, collective self-reflection, and the mutual exploration of strategies to continue living. Books become an experimental object of direct action. I stopped using the backpack printer; now the books have at least 50 pages and a minimum of 1,500 copies of each are printed. Altogether these Urgent Editions set up a present-time archive of counter-narratives.
¿Mapuche Terrorist? (2019-2022). After 150 years of genocide, a new generation of Mapuche people who were born in impoverished neighborhoods got together to declare: “We are not poor, we are Mapuche, we will recover our ancestral lands, our language, our ceremonies, our authorities.” They are leading a process of political spirituality that has no precedent in what is now called Argentina. They are being marked as internal enemies and as terrorists by the State and the mainstream media. In this book, the Mapuche community Lof Lafken Winkul Mapu tells for the very first time their own version of how the State security forces murdered Rafael Nahuel, and they make it known widely that a new Machi is rising in the community, the first one in the Puel Mapu in almost a hundred years.
North Border (2017-2018). In the midst of a new wave of migrant caravans traveling towards the United States, 13 people who were forced to flee their countries in the Global South seeking a new life in North America share their experiences. “Migrants are being constructed as political enemies.” “Migrants are being incorporated into the discourse of war.” “Migration is the very dispute of what we call borders.” “Migrant caravans are an uprising! a rebellion!” “To migrate is to begin a new story for your life.”
Juan Pablo by Ivonne: A counter-narrative to the Chocobar doctrine (2018). On December 8, 2017 in Buenos Aires, police officer Luis Chocobar shot and killed Juan Pablo Kukoc, an eighteen-year-old who had stolen a camera from a US tourist. Macri’s government portrayed Chocobar as a hero, inviting the citizenry to “take justice in its own hands” and kill all “pibes chorros,” non-white youth that wear caps and sports clothes and listen to loud music. The State took this murder as a slogan and started to call its repressive policy the Chocobar Doctrine. The case marks a turning point in the post-dictatorship period in Argentina: a neoliberal government once again pushes the limits of State violence and strains the collective process for Memory, Truth and Justice.
Earthquake (2017). On September 19, 2017, an earthquake struck Mexico City. The earthquake took place on the same day as the terrible earthquake of 1985. During the following days I set up a table with a computer and the backpack printer in different boroughs of the city, with signs that read: “Memory Collection,” “Talk to me and read yourself,” “Print your voice for free,” “Self-journalism,” “The present is confusing.” People spoke to me, I transcribed their voices and read the text aloud to them in that same moment. They took as many copies as they wanted to spread their words.
The Hotel is a Body. Four Legendary at the Gondolín. (2021). Hotel Gondolín is a hotel created and run by travestis in Buenos Aires that for decades has served as a refuge for trans people who migrate to the city. Four of the legendary founders of the Hotel, travestis who fought against police violence and struggled to gain the first national rights for the LGBTIQ+ community, pass their memory on to those who are inventing themselves as transgender people today.
MAY 17-JUL 24, 2019
Rirkrit Tiravanija: (who’s afraid of red, yellow, and green) was the Hirshhorn’s first-ever exhibition of works by contemporary Thai artist Rirkrit Tiravanija. Organized by Mark Beasley, the museum’s Robert and Arlene Kogod Secretarial Scholar, Curator of Media and Performance Art, the exhibition transformed the Hirshhorn’s galleries into a communal dining space in which visitors were served curry and invited to share a meal together. The installation included a large-scale mural, drawn on the walls over the course of the exhibition, which referenced protests against Thai government policies. Additional historic images spoke to protest and the present. The exhibition also included a series of documentary shorts curated exclusively for the Hirshhorn by Thailand’s leading independent filmmaker and Palme d’Or prize-winner Apichatpong Weerasethakul in collaboration with the artist. Tiravanija’s presentation united his signature communal food-based work with his ongoing series of drawings derived from protest imagery, creating a unique dialogue within a single installation.
Tiravanija’s long and varied career defies classification. For nearly 30 years, his artistic production has focused on real-time experience and exchange, breaking down the barriers between object and spectator. The title of Tiravanija’s culinary installation, which was presented at the Hirshhorn for the first time since it entered the museum’s collection in 2017, (who’s afraid of red, yellow, and green), refers to the colors worn by the various factions in recent Thai government protests. The title also refers to the 1982 vandalism of Barnett Newman’s similarly titled painting in Berlin, which was motivated by the attacker’s belief that Newman’s painting was a “perversion” of the German flag. To soften Newman’s provocative title, Tiravanija uses parentheses and lowercase letters, suggesting that viewers answer the question as framed: “Who is afraid of what these colors symbolize?”
Tiravanija’s unorthodox work first came to public view in a 1989 New York group show that included Untitled Empty Parenthesis, which consisted of the remains of a green curry meal. He continued to challenge the possibilities of the gallery space, eventually co-opting it as a site for the preparation and consumption of communal meals for gallery-goers as in Untitled (Free) (1992), and even going so far as to invite people to live within the gallery in Untitled (1999), which was an exact replica of his East Village apartment. Tiravanija’s interest lies in a desire to subvert deeply ingrained ways of interacting with art. By seeking alternative experiences of time, Tiravanija opens the door for novel forms of collaboration and exchange by diminishing the preciousness of objects through a reconsideration of their life cycle and function.
Bibliography:
- First Seasons — Reunión - Dani Zelko. (n.d.). https://reunionreunion.com/First-Seasons
- The Archive in Art Art in the Archive - Features - Atassi Foundation. (n.d.). https://www.atassifoundation.com/features/the-archive-in-art-art-in-the-archive
- VIDEO-INSTALLATIE IK ONTMOET MIJ - het werk. (n.d.). Female Economy. https://femaleeconomy.nl/werk/installaties/video-installatie-ik-ontmoet-mij/
- LA LEYENDA DEL MATE y LA LUNA – Rosamonte. (n.d.). https://rosamonte.com.ar/la-leyenda-del-mate-y-la-luna/
- Melissa Febos | Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative | Catapult | 2022 |
- Diana Taylor | Performance | 2015 | Argentina
The table and food as a spatial mediums for bringing together in collaboration communities were to invite TABU conversations in a "SAFE" way. ARCHIVE this act and share it with external audiences.
OK.... Collective
About It's OK... commoning uncertainties
About It's OK... commoning uncertainties
Over the past three months, more than a hundred local residents, artists, activists, united in 'circles of experience', organised several weekly public gatherings in the Oude Kerk around contemporary uncertainties and urgencies. In several meetings, questions were raised about how community spirit can contribute to a more resilient social fabric. During the festive finale on 22 and 23 September, we will collectively learn from-and contribute to-the deep work and explorations done during the It's OK... programme. It's OK... commoning uncertainties runs until 24 September 2023.
Elements of my work:
- Buiding element of a table or dinner togueether
- Table / Food
- Communities
- TABU Topics / POlitics
- Dialogues (Material)
- Collaborations
- Objetc actions
- ARCHIVES
- TIME IN THE PAST/PRESENT/ FUTURE
The FreeShop is a place where nothing is for sale, and everything is free.
Building belongings with what we have.
With the skills we put at the table.
Doing what we like doing together.
DIY practices, theory and initiatives are liminal sites, spaces of transformation, passage and creativity. As such they are important sites of re-skilling, in which we prepare ourselves for new forms of relationship necessary to break authoritarian and hierarchical structures. DIY culture is about sustainability and learning the diverse tasks and varied interpersonal skills necessary for collective work and living. This skill sharing serves to redistribute least desirable tasks equally, discourage the emergence of knowledge elites and old-fashioned curatorial practices, to support creative engagement.
Some of the Furnitures populating the space during the Open kitchen Weekender (17—19 October 2024) come from a collective attempt to practice DIY with care and appreciation for each other's skills and ideas. They are built with waste material found around the storages of BAK by artist and carpentry wizard Gerardo Gomez Tonda. The banner is painted by b.a.k. comrade and graphic Berend Bombarius.
The Open Kitchen FreeShop furniture is an interactive space for taking, leaving and giving coffee cups, zines, homemade jars, home brewed drinks, cables and tools, plates and posters, clothing and electronic devices.
The Open Kitchen FreeShop furniture is a conversation between Grace Lostia & Gerardo Gomez Tonda in preparation for the Open Kitchen Weekender: event that took place at BAK during 17—19 October 2024, co-convened by b.ASIC a.CTIVIST k.ITCHEN, Community Portal/Civic Praxis and their extended inter-local network of activists, brewers, artists, researchers & community kitchen practitioners.
THE COLLECTION OF FEARS AND DESIRES 2000-PRESENT
Roos van Geffen
Performance in public space
“What is your greatest desire? What is your deepest fear”?
Roos van Geffen has been asking these two questions to people all over the world for more than 20 years. She types the answers on a card. Date, age, occupation and place of residence are also noted. The person who answers remains anonymous. The thousands of fears and desires recorded can be viewed on request. Van Geffen also gives performance lectures, in which she shares her collection of fears and desires with the audience. Roos van Geffen collected fears and desires from 2000 in Den Bosch, America, Maastricht, London, Terschelling, Enschede, Cardiff, Amsterdam, Almere, Swansea, Denbigh, among others.
I HATE TALKING: CONVERSATION ABOUT POLARIZATION, EMOTIONS, AND POLITICS
Public debate is becoming harsher, with emotions like fear and anger increasingly driving our interactions. Why can’t I stand your opinion? Why can’t we speak without getting angry? How do we coexist with people who hold entirely different worldviews? Julian Hetzel and Bart Brandsma will examine these questions at De Balie.
With the recent election victories by far-right parties in mind, we explore the boundary between constructive polarisation and unproductive conflict. Is polarisation and extremism best addressed from a moderate position, or does radicalism require a radical response?
This programma is the first in a series of thought-provoking encounters, dialogues, round table talks and artistic interventions by Studio Julian Hetzel and de Balie Amsterdam. The events deal with the relation between politics and emotions like love, hate, anger and fear. The events are part of the research for Three Times Left is Right, Studio Julian Hetzel’s new performance that will premiere on 17 May at Wiener Festwochen, Vienna (AT). The Dutch premiere is on 29 May at SPRING Performing Arts Festival Utrecht
Seat at the Table: Reclaiming Space for Women
In conjunction with the exhibition Women of Amsterdam: an ode by the Amsterdam Museum, Tabili presents A Seat at the Table: Reclaiming Space for Women. This interactive installation is inspired by the historical exclusion of women from decision-making spaces and important cultural conversations.
The table, a universal symbol of community, dialogue and inclusion, serves as a platform to acknowledge the women excluded and honor their contributions. You are invited to reflect on a woman-present or past-who deserves “a place at the table.” Answering a series of reflective questions about this woman's influence, you can share your thoughts on bills, which are then attached to the tablecloth with paper clips.
As part of the experience, you can take a fortune cookie. Inside, you will find a suggestion of a woman in your life-such as a mother, colleague, aunt or friend-about whom you can write, as guidance for your reflection and participation in this collective tribute. This act symbolizes how the stories and legacies of women are woven into the fabric of our society. Each bill gives these women a physical and symbolic place at the table, reclaiming their rightful space in history and culture.
This installation also celebrates themes of resistance and empowerment, highlighting how women have fought and earned their right to be heard and recognized.