In New Orleans, a boomerang is a drink prepared at one bar and sent — via a willing patron — to a bartender working at another. The hospitality inverts. The person who spends their professional life providing generosity receives an unexpected act of it instead. There are rules. The drink travels. The bartender who receives it makes a new one and sends it on.
The tradition belonged to one city. We wanted to find out if it could belong to more. Beginning in Madrid in 2024, we arrived at bars not as customers but as carriers — bringing a drink from wherever we had just been, for the bartender, from a bartender they might never meet. Three rules govern the project: no bar repeats. You can only drink if you choose to continue it. No citrus. That last rule was learned in practice. Every bar, every drink, every bartender is recorded in a passport — a physical book that travels with the boomerang, accumulating the history of everywhere it has been.
Sixty-six bars across ten countries. Hospitality in its conventional form is directional — it flows from the person behind the bar to the person in front of it. The boomerang is a question about whether that direction is inherent to the form or simply habitual. The project is ongoing.