Drinking mate is one of the most widespread forms of social interaction in my native country, Argentina. Since moving abroad, performing this ritual has been a way to feel connected to my argentine identity, but my new surroundings feel strange in a way that contradicts the familiarity of this performance. “Five o'clock mate” is a flip book of my effort to re-contextualize my argentine ritual of drinking mate in my UK home, a process that is fractured and stretches in time.

Anne-Marie Fortier defines rituals as a “performance of a collective ´body´” ¹ , where group identity is embodied through small innocuous movements with no other special meaning than the one they form in that specific order in that specific context. These rituals hold belonging; they are seamless when we move in the contexts they were created in. When they are uprooted, they still hold the memory of their origin, but become stunted, fractured, they must learn to exist in a new context until they become familiar again.

In Argentina, drinking mate is the most significant social ritual we practice daily, usually during the afternoon. It is a pre-Columbian native drink made of mate herbs brewed in hot water, similar to tea. Since its origins, drinking mate has been a ritual of social connection and equality. The native South American people would sit together to share mate after working the lands, and after colonization it facilitated communication between the natives and the Jesuit missionaries. This ritual has always unified and equalized; it was consumed and shared amongst the rich, poor, masters, slaves, natives, colonizers, men, women, and is still practiced in Argentina amongst family, friends and strangers.

“Five o'clock mate” shows the process of re-contextualizing my argentine ritual by selecting one frame from every day´s performance to reconstruct the ritual from start to finish, thus stretching one sequence of drinking mate over the span of two months. It is inspired by Tehching Hsieh´s “One Year Performance 1980–1981” where he recorded real time by punching a time clock every hour for a year. “Five o'clock mate” challenges Hsieh´s notion of ´real time´ within the complex process of belonging and familiarity that are uprooted during migration. It stretches time through its reconstruction of the ritual over two months, and also condenses time into the flip book form, a fractured sequence of frames where the viewer determines the speed at which to pass the pages, therefore its duration is subjective and flexible. The result is both two months long and however many seconds it takes the viewer to flip through it.

So, how long does it take to belong?

There is clearly no fixed answer, but by repeatedly performing a tradition so significant in the collective consciousness of my country in my new UK home, I am learning to belong a little bit more every day.