Single-channel video installation (transferred from 35 mm film), color, sound
64 min


Tea is the work that closed García Torres's exploration of Alighiero Boetti’s time in Kabul. The work follows the narrative originally established with Shar-e Naw Wanderings (A Film Treatment). Commissioned by Documenta 13, Tea follows García Torres’s actual journey to Kabul, staged more than ten years after the fictionalized trip, which was said to have taken place in 2001. The artist’s process of physically traveling to Kabul, thus making a piece of fiction into a reality, raises a number of speculative questions about truth, nostalgia, hospitality, and displacement. What does it mean to return to a place while visiting it for the first time? How far really is Afghanistan from Mexico? Can one relive a memory even if it may have never really happened? How can a guest become a host due to his belated arrival? The film elaborates on these questions and is a recollection of García Torres's and Boettis' respective stories of relocation. Boetti move to Afghanistan in 1971 was particularly puzzling and intriguing because of the way the artist disappeared and subsequently reinvented himself through travel and transfiguration, allowing him to leave behind his persona as an artist and become someone else, not only a hotelier but also one of a fictional set of twins. 


*1975 in Monclova, Mexico | Living and working in Mexico City, Mexico

Mario Garcia Torres spoke with Luis Jacob following the Canadian premiere of his film Tea on the occassion of the Reel Artists Film Festival in Toronto, 2013.