Sala de té [an itinerant, unwalled Paradise for cultivating climate futures]

Sala de Té is an itinerant tea room that creates a temporary space for knowledge exchange and deep listening practices. Founded in Mexico City in 2022, this collaborative practice utilizes a samovar tea set and a spread of mats, rugs, and cushions to create independent yet permeable architectures in public spaces. Participants co-create situated installations and narratives, proposing that serving and sharing tea is both an act of hospitality and a vector for critical pedagogies.

For the duration of School of Commons, we proposed a tea room series to explore [an itinerant, unwalled Paradise for cultivating climate futures] through speculative archeology and architecture. How can we prepare for uncertain futures by establishing the framework for efficient self-organising? Our principal project in this series, Tensile Paradise, is a mobile participatory intervention informed by traditional Iranian tea rooms and the vernacular architecture of Mexican protest movements. It is a hands-on research project that aims to explore structures of organizing by organizing a structure. As part of its guiding line, our collective examines the structure of different types of human organisations throughout history that have managed to operate effectively despite limited resources and personnel. Examples include nomadic herding communities, partisan movements during WW2, independent workers' unions, online fan clubs, climate activists, pirate gangs, etc. By analyzing their structure, a web of connection points between their differing structures can be drawn up and recreated using tensile architecture. During our activations, we encourage participants to take on self-assigned roles to collaborate on constructing a self-standing structure held together only by its tensile strength. There are no blueprints. However, in negotiating the tension of the connecting cords between each node, participants explore both the structure of organizations and also how their organizing results in a structure, both physical and social.

The completed structure transforms into a tearoom. Within it, the collective drinks tea together, made and served from an Iranian samovar. Hospitality and conviviality turn structure-building into place-making. During this time, a guided reflection on the experience of organizing is discussed using the newly built structure as a parallel metaphor. Where did communication break down, and what are the structural weak points? How are these weak points compensated for with structural connections elsewhere?