Dear collaborators and co-hosts,

We, the curatorial team at Hosting Lands, are writing in to invite you to a workshop on co-hosting protocols, to be held on Zoom. We are deciding on the date and time, so please feel free to submit your preferences on the doodle poll link. These conversations on co-hosting are practical and important to us, and thus attendance is mandatory for us all.

As the title of our project, Hosting Lands, indicates, hosting is an important part of what we are trying to achieve. To host, is to invite, to welcome, to tend to, and to bear responsibility towards whom we invite, our guests as it were. And every act of curating, bears this act of invitation, or hosting. As Beatrice Von Bismarck and others remind us, “It implies invitations to artists, artworks, curators, audiences, and institutions; people and objects are received, welcomed, and temporarily brought together. It offers resources for material and physical support while also responding to a need for recognition, respect, or attention. Finally, and very importantly, a curatorial situation operates in the space between an unconditional acceptance of the other and exclusions legitimized through various rules and regulations.”

This act of hosting and curating, co-hosting and co-curating, then is its own constant negotiation of roles, positions, politics and protocols. Its own delicate balance. The host and the guest are bound by mutual consideration and accountability, and they are interdependent, made by each other; shaped by the gesture of good will, generosity and trust - and hierarchies of power. The oscillation between roles (guest/host) is imperative for the unfolding of a good visit. These hosting protocols are to open up the space for discussion, and mediating differences, and to recognize and work at that we do not share the same privileges and positions in this project. These protocols are about defining collective guidelines for how we host and visit each other, and making action plans for difficult situations, for both hosts and guests, where access and visit may not be easy, painless or without political friction.

In order to find these common understandings and politics of hosting we thought that it would be important to create co-hosting protocols together - protocols that tie us together and to the specific needs and desires of each site. And in this light of negotiations and hosting, we will make a workshop where we can shape and negotiate common grounds. This is something that should have happened in the beginning, but Hosting Lands has a slow pace and we are still learning empirically as the project goes. We have understood along the way that we need to be precise and articulate in our vision and practice of hosting and we hope that the workshop will help us shape a protocol that we all agree upon. Thank you for your patience and listening to us along the way. Below are the practicalities of the workshop that we hope you all bear in mind, prior and through the event.

Practicalities of the co-hosting workshop:

Date: 19.03.2024

Total Time: 3 hours. (10am to 1pm)

Venue - Zoom

Attendance: As co-host we think it is compulsory that you all attend the workshop so let’s please find dates where we are all available to engage in this endeavor. Please find the link to the doodle poll here under. At least 1-2 co-hosts from each site must be present.

Attendance fees: We propose to offer 15.000 DKK (incl. tax) per site from the overall budget (45.000 DKK co-host fee) to cover the labor time used on these co-hosting protocols & care riders process.

Tentative structure of the workshop - We will start the basis of our conversation from a tentative list of co-hosting protocols that our dear collaborator