Wish Café is an artistic and social experiment that was kicked off by the call to take part in the exhibition Extranjerías, that took place at Espacio Fundación Telefónica in Buenos Aires, Argentina, during July and August 2009. It was curated by Néstor García Canclini and Andrea Giunta.
Wish Café is a device for the collective construction of a map of human desire. In brief, it is a social network where participants are defined by their wishes, and only by them.
The starting point of this social experiment is the realization that all of us live in a network, that the set of our links defines our place in the world, and that technology provides us with an ever-increasing number of ways to represent that situation.
Wish Café is, in some way, an anti-net, because it is a network of holes. It intends to make visible, not what we have, but what we are lacking. In other words, to what extent are we still out-of-place in the place we occupy, in which ways are we foreigners at our own home.
Wishes that are shared among different users create an emerging network that progressively builds a dynamic map of human desire. People who wish the same become closer, wishes that are wished by the same people do also get closer. The interplay of all these tensions in an abstract space originates affinity areas or ‘neighborhoods’, that correspond to different life projects and ways of being in the world.
Prizes and exhibitions
