CAROLINA PIMENTA

24 - 25 October 2020 15:00 - 19:00 

It is imperative that you are strangers.

Enter the room.

Sit in the chair.

Do not speak.

For 30 seconds just breathe and look at each other.

A conversation menu will be handed to you.

Please follow the questions.

Exit the room.

You have up to 10 mins.

Performance Score Carolina Pimenta 2020

SILL THE BEANS 

The room is empty, it only has 2 chairs. Two strangers will sit 1 meter apart from each other, with nothing in between, for the first thirty seconds they will be asked to merely look at each other and breath, then a conversational menu will be handed to them, they will be asked to follow the menu and to be honest.

When was the last time you had a real conversation?

In society we are ever more growing apart, it seems like we are losing the ability to have a significant conversation. Most conversations become mundane and redundant to questions such as what do you do? Or Where do you come from? And it’s often hard to break away from this mold and truly engage with a stranger. At the beginning of 2020, I was having a conversation with a friend who had just come back from a sort of healing center, in which she spent a month without being able to give away any personal information, she couldn’t say how many siblings she had, where she grew up, her social background, what she studied, what her profession was, etc.… It made me deeply curious on how these are key points to define us and almost act as shelters for one to escape a deeper conversation. For a long time, I have been intrigued by modern psychology and how we play different charterers in our day-to-day depending on which “stage” we are standing in. I later discovered the historian and professor Theodor Zeldin and his intriguing work with the conversational dinners, which further propelled my curiosity and desire to provoke this performance. 

We are often afraid to share our own thoughts, ideas and fears, and I believe that through sharing our experiences we can all benefit from internal growth, very much like One Shot & If I tell you mine, will you tell me yours?, With this performance I propose to provoke the participant to have a deeper and honest engagement, to remove the masks under which we all hide, in which not only the participant will find out about themselves but hopefully gain a different perspective and new understating of society. When two people talk with mutual respect and listen with a real interest in understanding another point of view, when they try to put themselves in the place of another, to get inside their skin, they change the world, even if it is only by a minute amount, because they are establishing equality between two human beings. Fully engaging themselves in a respectful, meaningful conversation, to understand the other person in a new way.

The conversational questions will be separated into two menus, displayed in multiple random orders, to try and avoid information passing from one viewer to another so that one cannot previously think about the answers they would give.