À (X) table(s) belongs to Chez Nausicaa, a project in which Esmeralda Kosmatopoulos hosted four anonymous dinners in a traditional Athenian home for locals, refugees and travellers, reviving the ancient Greek law of hospitality, xenia: the host feeds and shelters the stranger without asking who they are, and the guest, in time, offers their name and their story. Where the dinners themselves were made of conversation and the slow disclosure of who each guest was, this series turns to what happens beneath words.
Each dinner was filmed from above, in one continuous take, uncut and without sound. The camera sees only the table. Languages, accents and stories fall away, and what remains are bodies: hands reaching for bread, a dish passed from one guest to another, glasses raised, a shoulder leaning in, an arm drawing back. Stripped of speech, the meal becomes legible as a sequence of movements, pauses and exchanges, a silent ballet performed by people who never rehearsed and did not know they were dancing.
The four videos are built by accumulation. À (une) table(s) shows a single dinner. In À (deux) table(s), a second is laid over the first; À (trois) table(s) adds a third; in À (quatre) table(s), all four play at once. With each new layer comes another group of strangers and another evening, and yet the gestures begin to answer one another with an almost uncanny precision. A hand on one night seems to reach for a plate served on another. Someone pours as someone else, days later, holds out a glass. Offering, receiving, waiting, passing: the same movements return from one table to the next, as if they had been learned together.
Each dinner remains a singular event, shaped by the people present and the circumstances that brought them together. Yet the layering reveals something that transcends these individual encounters: a shared repertoire of gestures through which people offer, receive and exchange food. These gestures belong to no single culture. They form a common grammar of the table, one that can be understood without translation.
The image creates a community that never existed in reality. People who never met, from different countries and on different days, end up seated together, held by neither a common language nor a shared story but by the oldest ritual of hospitality, passing food to the person beside you. The superimposition invents an encounter that did not take place, and in doing so shows one that could have. Documentary footage becomes fiction without a single image being staged.
The French title keeps both the call to the table, À table!, and its open plural. One table or several, one evening or four, one community or many: the X is left for the viewer to fill in, as if the question of how many tables it takes to make a single one had no fixed answer.
