Paper short abstract:

In this paper we present a description of the Tear Dealer project, an artistic fake-business in the town of Lublin(Southeast Poland) that created unforeseen tactics of all participants to adapt to the emerging reality of crying, slowing down and thus building unexpected moments of self-reflective turns-on.

Paper long abstract:

In this paper we present an ethnographic description of the Tear Dealer, project conducted by the artists Alicja Rogalska and Łukasz Surowiec, in the town of Lublin of Southeast Poland, in an urban area with high unemployment; full of pawnshops, and loan sharks. The main purpose of this paper is to show a kind of faked, new-business set in an impoverished urban district as a particular artistic-ethnographic trap designed for producing the moment of slowing down faced an unexpected emotional work. Further on, we will focus on how the “Tear Dealer” project has opened and provoked a series of moments requiring slowing down within the situation of tear dealing, thus leading to the effect of “language stretching” and “meeting the reflective” among the coming tear-sellers. In this way, it was created the quasi-experimental research situation in which the socio-biographical reality of all participants could have been unfolded and opened to the unplanned expressions and experiences.