El Salón Central, a Place? or a No-Place
Askari MATEOS
To define a space like El Salón Central, born of a collective necessity to create a gathering place for an inclusive micro-group or tribe – as anthropologists define it – that is open to change and allows for the possibility of a deep analysis of what we understand as the concept of city which, for Robert Ezra Park, the inspiration of the School of Chicago movement, is the place of “the rise of the individual as a unit of thought and action”.

But what is El Salon Central?
Guillermo Olguín tells how El Salón Central was born of the necessity to find a space where friends could meet. An orphanage. Once La Tentación was removed and became a hang-out for the “Zocalo Boys” honored for being the providers for a series of services for female tourists, mainly Anglo-Saxon, for the exchange of sentimental visas and with that this pre-cursor to the salsa mix in Oaxaca ceases to be a place to interest the tribe that attends the “artist’s private club” – as Olguin has defined El Central. Located on Hidalgo 302, the same curse will befall El Piano and El Sofá, La Farola and others, which upon being remodeled lost their captivating essence.

Olguín tells how in 1999 El Salon Central was nothing more than his studio. After having traveled to Europe, specifically Hungry, and there having experienced small salons that showed low budget films, he decided to convert his space into a cinema, before Francisco Toledo gave Oaxaca El Pochote. But Toledo started up El Pochote and we helped him out by finding the seats, and so the cinema was already there, but there was still a lack of a place, a meeting place….. One day I got a windfall of a little money from some of my painting and I took out my studio. I took a year and a half to set it up and in November of 2001 the rough diamond was inaugurated…. From the first day we had a good showing”.
Later little by little “El Central” started to gather little details becoming an eclectic space that “almost didn’t look like any other place in the world. It wasn’t for showing off nor to make Europeans feel at
home it was to enter into a place no place, it was a trip to another world, Cuba, Russia, Turkey, Spain, France, England….” An alternative cultural space had been born which would hold the whole world.

When Guillermo Olguín went to Paris, El Central was closed for 7 months… “it was almost dissolved”. Because it was an artist created space, the powers that be in Oaxaca claimed it was a place for selling and consuming drugs. “One day dozens of police searched the clientele, they found nothing. But they closed the place for a week for licensing problems, I decided that I didn’t want to negotiate with the Municipal Authorities and so I made it a “private club for artists” and we opened clandestinely for a year”.

Besides all this, El Central “has provoked a series misunderstandings” and prejudices. There are those who have claimed that black masses are celebrated there, just because a part of the stage has small figures or totems from other cultures.

It was precisely art and the donation of works that was what let the place open anew and to establish it as a collective. El Colectivo Central, in which 7% of what is consumed is goes to a fund to support civil organizations that help different sectors of Oaxacan society.

This space still has trouble with harassment by the municipality. It’s a place for concerts, good cinema, exhibits, and it hopes to eventually edit and publish literary works by young authors. It has also established an agreement with La Alianza Franco Mexicana de Oaxaca, it is creating links in Mexico City to decentralize culture and bring it closer to Oaxaca by offering a quality space. “It is a bar and a form of offering culture to youth and for other things that need to be done for society. It’s not that are the inheritors of philanthropy but it’s impossible to walk the streets of this city to note that it’s screwed”.

For Olguin it is important to decentralize the poorly organized institutional culture offered by the state, and so in “El Central” it is possible to see a first class concert and to enjoy artistic creations by well known artists from Mexico and abroad, which de contextualizes de-mystifies the role played by the artist by establishing direct communication which allows immediate critique.

In conclusion, El Central is a multifunctional space that opens its doors each night to generate stories of all kinds. It is a place that is capable of convoking a certain group or tribe of intellectuals with concerns that find echo among themselves.

That is why thinking that Salon Central is a no-place, is risky because it is not difficult to anticipate the flowering in Oaxaca a space where the urban tribes or neo-tribes can converge with a kind of need that ceases being simply a service to become a space of identity. According to Michel Maffesoli, another well known anthropologist, these, (the tribes) seek to build a new form of sociability in which “the main idea is to live with the group, avoid politics to center on the complicity of the sharing within the collective (esthetic codes, rituals, ways of listening to music, self spaces)…. The neo-tribal sociability opposes emphatic attitudes wherein the inter-subjective relationships move in a mater of ambiance rather than of specific contents, of “feeling” more than
the rationality of means or ends”.

This is reinforced by the projects the collective promotes, it plans to hold Sunday matinees for children. Also outside the space that comprises El Salon Central, the collective once tried to obtain the Mitla movie theatre, but they weren’t able to. Now they plan to invite Francisco Toledo to recuperate the Reforma Cinema to make a movie library.

In his book Los no-Lugares. Spaces of anonymity (Gedisa, Barcelona 1993), Marc Augé, professor of anthropology and ethnology of l’Ecole des Hautes Études en Science Sociales de París also speaks about the “massification” as a form of absence of all sence of daily life (images,
imaginary, names, nicknames, presence). “If a place can be defined as a place of relative and historic identity, a space that can’t be defined as a place of identity nor as relative nor historic, will be defined as a no-place”.

“A no-place is a contemporary space of anonymous confluence. It is a space transitory waiting place where it is not possible to start even brief dialogues and in which frequently what links two individuals is a quick glance. A no-place is that in which a space is shared and one shares anonymous meetings that perhaps will never be repeated.
With Augé’s theory, it is clear that El Central is a place of meeting and identity, not so for those who are just passing through, those who don’t belong to the micro-group or tribe, those who are outside of a society that has reformed the space and have made it theirs night after night in a kind of alternative glamour whose concerns go beyond the classist dialysis.
http://www.colectivocentral.com/indexeng.htm