A land is not a site, but  a matrix encompassing worlds, humans, non-humans and the more than human. It hosts spirits that are born, die and are reborn with the cycle of seasons. Hosting Lands is a framework for thinking and inhabiting how we might hold these fragments in relation, and how they might breathe and resonate together. It understands lands as active, sometimes unruly, agents which we might find kinship and develop non-extractive forms of life with.

Hosting Lands, Between the Ruin, the Field and the Forest is a distributed, semi-nomadic and situated exhibition that unfolds over the course of three years through a constellation of collaborations between practitioners in Denmark, South Korea, Puerto Rico, Tunisia and more, with Ida Benke and Dea Thune Antonsen (Laboratory for Aesthetics and Ecology); Abhijan Toto and Pujita Guha (Forest Curriculum) and Aziza Harmel playing the role of mediators and facilitators. The project focuses on specific located issues in each context, of land rights, indigenous knowledges and aesthetic relations, and needs of communities, and attempts to produce a space 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 project seeks to support off-site exhibition initiatives that rethink relations to land via participatory art projects, community building, farming and resource sharing.

The exhibition will see the purchase and legal commoning of patches of farmland, upon which long-term art and community projects will probe the possibilities of creating different worlds, relations, belonging and futures through activist and communal exhibition models. 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.
Hosting Lands is conceived of as cycles of gathering, growing, harvesting and ruination, often co-tempornaeously, often through falling between temporalities, creating a space for embodied solidarity and understanding between the different stakeholders involved.