Argentina
Shibari in Argentina is documented in Buenos Aires and La Plata, where a dojo began group classes in 2014 and a rope community with its own staged performance cycle grew from it, all in Spanish.
Cities
Numbers show studios and communities.
Coming up in Argentina
Regular events
Shibari in Argentina
An account of how shibari reached Argentina comes from two authors who describe themselves as artists, researchers and practitioners of shibari. In a paper presented in May 2024 at a performing-arts research conference in La Plata, Karen Dayanna Medina Díaz and Julio Martín Pavón trace the practice’s path from Japan to Europe and the United States and then to Latin America. How Japanese rope spread abroad is told in Kinbaku goes global.
A founding dojo in Buenos Aires
The authors name one event as a founding experience of shibari in Latin America: the start of group training classes at Kinbakumania Dojo in Buenos Aires in 2014. There its teacher, Haru Tsubaki, also known as Camelia, began to pass on what she had studied since 2010 with teachers in Europe and Japan, above all Yukimura Haruki, Yukinaga Max and Osada Steve. Because Osada Steve learned from Osada Eikichi, the authors write, the school treats the onlooker’s point of view as central and ties so that the person in rope can always be seen, even when nobody else is in the room. The school and the scene that followed it in the capital are described in the Buenos Aires guide.
La Plata
From that school, the paper says, grew a rope community in La Plata, with its own events and artistic projects. Among them are a workshop on expressive tools for staged shibari, aimed at local practitioners and students, and Kinbaku Íntimo, a cycle in which practitioners tie in front of a small audience; by the time of the paper it had held twelve editions since 2019. The authors read these evenings through theater studies, as encounters in which performers and spectators shape each other’s experience.
Buenos Aires today
In the metropolitan area, public rope events are announced on community calendars such as KinkyVibe, which lists workshops and community rope evenings for the Buenos Aires region alongside online meetings. The sources found for this overview do not describe rope groups in other provinces.
Language
The paper, the calendar and the workshop listings are in Spanish. For the difference between a jam and a class, see Rope jams, munches and salons.