Be my guest – or would you like to be the host? A curated infrastructure
37OPENING: 09. März 2023, 18 Uhr
In March 2023, spce will host a curated infrastructure for almost a month, designed by Neele Marie Denker, which will bring together accomplices / friends / thinkers and designers for workshops, talks, dinners, discourses, collaborations and community according to the principle of invitation.
spce adopts this gesture of hospitality and applies it to its entire work structure for a month.
Concept:
Neele Marie Denker
in collaboration with Sven Christian Schuch (spce | Muthesius)
& Guests
Graphics: Jonas Fischer
Photo: Neele Denker
Hospitality, for all its generosity, is a complex concept. Often reduced to sociability or reciprocity, it initially seems to have a fundamentally positive connotation. In search of a spatial form of hospitality, Denker examines the potential of hospitality and its relevance for the curatorial. Popular elements of a situation based on hospitality form the basis of the discussion: the table, the gift and the invitation.
“A curatorial situation is always one of hospitality”: it receives, welcomes, and brings people and things together for a limited period of time. Enabling this divided public is the gift that comes to bear in curatorial hospitality. The pandemic calls for a reinforcement of hospitable gestures, and current debates, such as those surrounding Documenta 15, also illustrate the ambivalence and complexity of the hospitable condition of exhibiting.
Instead of focusing on the usual form of exhibition presentation, Be my guest – or would you like to be the host? explores situationally the question of what conditions and opportunities are needed to be able to host. Collaboration in this process is central and enhances a sense of urgency in which host and guest roles, forms of cultural production and coming together are reconsidered and renegotiated.
The curated infrastructure designs access points to find thoughts, perspectives, conditions and tools for plural responses to/for/with hospitality.
The project is the result of a master's thesis that was created in the Spatial Strategies course at the Muthesius Academy of Art. Supervised by Prof. Frauke Gerstenberg and Prof. Sandra Schramke.
