Esbozos hacia una genealogía del shibari latinoamericano: un refugio de cuerdas platense
A 2023 conference paper by Guaglianone, Medina Díaz, Pavón and Demartin that sketches a situated history of shibari in the rope community of La Plata, Argentina.
“Esbozos hacia una genealogía del shibari latinoamericano: un refugio de cuerdas platense” (“Sketches toward a genealogy of Latin American shibari: a rope refuge in La Plata”) is a paper by Fernanda Guaglianone, Karen Dayanna Medina Díaz, Julio Martín Pavón and Maite Lihuen Demartin. It was presented at the III Congreso Internacional de Artes, “revueltas del arte,” held on 10–12 October 2023 and hosted by the Facultad de Artes of the Universidad Nacional de La Plata, and it appears on pages 341–356 of the proceedings published in 2024. The university repository SEDICI holds it as a conference paper.
The authors describe shibari as a Japanese practice of restraint with rope, connected with eroticism, BDSM and sexual exploration, which traveled from Japan to Europe and the United States before reaching Latin America, where they note that research on it is still scarce. Their focus is the rope community of La Plata in Argentina.
They set out to build a situated, local genealogy of the practice: how it is developing in the area, what meanings it carries there, and what openings it offers. They frame shibari as restraint grounded in care, communication and trust, shaped by private sexuality, by the circulation of BDSM, and by images, performances and publications from the art world.
The approach is exploratory, based on available documents and on the local experiences of people who are tied, people who tie and people who watch. For time and space the authors borrow Koselleck’s ideas of spaces of experience and horizons of expectation and Besse’s notion of geographicity. The authors write as artists, researchers and shibari practitioners who want to help the study of the practice develop.