TU Wien, 2022
ATTP Architekturtheorie und Technikphilosophie
Thinking of hospitality in terms of invention. What could it mean to do that? And why try? Could we think of it with respect to today’s amalgamation of modes of inhabitation involving beings of human and non-human affiliation? How to let them come, to let them arrive? How to cultivate figures of hospitality in which habits do not engulf or fortify us but leak into more active, more spectral and perhaps even more exuberant manners of living well together today?
Philosophy, architecture, poetry, mythology and science will help us circle around these questions by offering us instruments to think of hospitality in solar terms. Let us postpone attention to the psychology of what is commonly meant by love, and attend to the falling round of the sun. Let us go solar, let us call for a more cosmic, impersonal and diffuse receptivity that plays no favorites, that is less emotional than magnetic or caloric, that floats in the interlude between doubt and decision, between disposition and action. Solarity as gravitation and photons, the sharing of a common physics, but also as a call to practice an inventive equanimity that actively hovers or lingers, that “witnesses and waits”: a radical impartiality letting things macerate in folds and angles that have not yet set home into our sensibility.
Thinking of hospitality under the sunlight might thus invite us to engage with the physicality of things and events by tempering solar sympathies; cosmic attunements that integrate by remaining vulnerable, that are lacunar yet exuberant, never taxonomic, never prescriptive. Being with rather than being as, the circumnavigation of empathy and its wish for epistemic colonization, resonance and reverberation, withness, the wish for oxygenating things in view of activating unfamiliar or even unknown manners of sharing the cosmos.
