“Sala para Estar” Diners

Abstract

This essay is an invitation to reflect on the performance "Sala para Estar - comensales" as an artistic practice that investigates the potential communion between Romany and non-Romany women. From the (re)production in the Comedor Universitario (UNC) of domestic micro rituals (in this case, the ceremony of gypsy tea and Argentinian mate), the performance promotes dimensions of interaction and visibilization of social relations, especially gender.

On the one hand, the contributions of aesthetic performances are taken up again as liminal practices that move between "hybrid" folds, deepening axes that refer to processes of cultural interaction. A series of negotiations, selections and reconfigurations of practices take place here, which are re-inscribed as processes of open ends, in which "change is happening". On the other hand, in this potential communion of encounters, we turn to the idea of rituals as collective memories that, staged from certain codes, enable the recognition of confluences rather than the emphasis on exoticizing and foreignizing differences. We think specifically of liminoid rituals that promote transformations of time and space, contributing to create experiences of "communitas" (Turner: 1988). Such experiences achieve efficacy from the invitation, displacing the spectacularity when sharing with the assistants these infusions not only daily but important for the sociability of our customs.

In this world of (dis)encounters, "Sala para Estar - comensales" proposes to be there... to remain... to be situated between... to construct a space that becomes a situation, a room, a body, a house, a workshop.