Open Room critically brings together the transformations carried out in the Mental Health hospitalization room of the "Teodoro Álvarez" general acute hospital, located in the neighborhood of Flores, in the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires. As a metaphor, Sala abierta is a performative gesture that replaces the formula "open doors", enthusiastically promoted in other rooms. A paradoxical expression that often leads to forced overmedication. And as we know, there is no possible act in health if the rights of all the people involved are not preserved. Yes, people! (against violative anti-humanism).

Sala abierta is also a cartography of the practical scope of the National Mental Health Law (not a minor issue, given the lasting confusions between work and empiricism). A conglomerate of testimonies and interwoven articulations. It is not about the progressive replacement of apolitical dogmas, the elaboration of a guide to good practices in health, or the nostalgic recovery of experiences from times that are no longer ours. This book is the partial and localized response that a group of workers elaborated around a series of questions-problems that concern hospitalizations and mental health.

How can we avoid the academization of theory, the romanticization of experience and the protocolization of practice? How do we keep the reader in the vibrating ground of the practice of an ethics and the politics of a practice?

Isn't it perhaps an auspicious way of thinking about interdisciplinary work? Here and now, but affiliated with our history?

We can think of this collective work as a concrete intervention in the field of heroic manias, celebratory pessimisms and

sacrificial heroism. The renewed interest in training in an asylum confirms the need to produce texts that dispute the established meanings and practices. There is still a huge vacancy in the publication of unprecedented experiences in the field of Mental Health.

Sala abierta is at the heart of this vacancy.

There is no worldview, individual hero or author. It is the time of collective emancipation. I proudly celebrate the release of this book.

Tomás Pal