Hosting Lands is a slow-growing, decentral exhibition movement unfolding around land, the relationship between host and guest, and the link between the hyper-local and the global. Over the course of three years, the exhibition will move between six locations throughout Denmark and engage local and international artists, activists and communities. Hosting Lands explores how we can steward and care for land differently through legal commoning of conventional farmlands and by working in collective and regenerative site-responsive manners. Hosting Lands orients itself towards futures beyond the exhibition movement itself by offering possibilities to inhabit artistic spaces as architecture of the everyday and creating lasting change in the landscapes and the worlds at stake.

A land is a living, vibrating matrix encompassing worlds, ecosystems and communities that both embrace and move beyond the human. Land carries the imprint of memories as slow and relentless processes of digestion, composting and recomposing yield and transform traces of the landscapes, species and lives that came before.. Land is a dynamic hosting site where presences, materials, creatures and communities arrive, live, die and are reborn with the cycle of seasons and the passing of time.

Land is sustenance. Land is where we build, live, grow and harvest. Land is deep and thick ecologies of interspecies interdependence. Land is bought and sold, conquered and extracted, it is where we place our borders and invest in identities tied to notions of heritage, culture, the nation state. The privatization and monoculturing of land has nearly eradicated the commons, the wetlands and any other kind of land that does not lend itself to an agricultural production scheme. Increasingly, land is sold to investment companies in order to intensely farm it or build upon it. Land is tied to ongoing struggles of coloniality, to the violent displacement of indigenous communities and to the ensuing removal of local knowledge of how to properly steward and care for land. Apprehensive and extractivist approaches need to be dismantled through deep, careful attention towards the land.

Hosting Lands. Between the Ruin, the Field and the Forest is a durational and decentral exhibition movement. It is a collective, slowly sprouting framework for exploring art as a labor of worlding and moving towards the regeneration of ecosystems, communities, cultures. With radical imagination, local community work, artistic and collective experimentation, commoning of knowledges and resources the exhibition seeks to build infrastructures for dreaming and enacting futures that challenge and offer alternatives to the necropolitics of our time.

Hosting Lands. Between the Ruin, the Field and the Forest unfolds over the course of three years through a constellation of collaborations between practitioners in Denmark, South Korea, India, Puerto Rico, Tunisia and more, with Ida Bencke and Dea Antonsen (Laboratory for Aesthetics and Ecology); Pujita Guha and Abhijan Toto (for The Forest Curriculum) and Aziza Harmel playing the role of mediators and facilitators. The project braids together hyper local sensitivities and knowledges with global perspectives, and departs from situated needs and potentials in producing and holding spaces for inter-local conversations and propositions for infrastructures of relations.

Taking the ruin, the forest and the field as three different, but interwoven approaches to land, this exhibition works from a distributed model that goes beyond binaries of urban and rural life, farmed and forested land, cultivation and ruination.The exhibition will see the purchase and legal commoning of conventional farmland, upon which long-term art and community projects will probe the possibilities of creating different worlds, relations, belongings and futures. This exhibition works from an ethos of site-responsibility as a way of practicing a sensitivity and responsiveness to place that also becomes an ethical, long-term obligation to the sites created and transformed by the curatorial and artistic interventions.

The exhibition movement seeks to support and build from already existing off-site, self-organised initiatives that rethink relations to land and community. As such, the exhibition is an exploration of alternative ways of organizing across cultural, communal and agricultural grassroot initiatives, and an experimental movement of instituting differently in the artworld and beyond.

Hosting Lands moves through cycles of gathering, growing, harvesting, celebration and hibernation, creating spaces of encounter and emergence, rest and resistance, embodied solidarity and radical hospitality. The exhibition rejects the idea of the new by engaging deep time, alternative worldbuilding and sustained community engagement. The exhibition does not break grounds, but carefully proposes and institutes a sustainable and accountable exhibition model that wishes to take responsibility for what and how it produces, and extends beyond its own scope by opening spaces of encounters, sites of dwelling and learning that will outlive the exhibition itself.