TU Wien, 2022
ATTP Architekturtheorie und Technikphilosophie
Is it possible to think of hospitality with respect to beings and fleshes of human and non-human affiliation? How to let them come, to let them arrive? What could it mean to be hospitable on a planet overlapping zoe/geo/techno modes of inhabitation? Can we imagine and activate figures of hospitality that set in motion new variations and unknown resonances regarding the practice of living well together today? How to think of hospitality in light of a temperament that is creative and recreative—rather than compassive or prescriptive?
Philosophy, architecture, art, mythology and science will propel the circulation and cultivation of these questions by offering us instruments to think of hospitality in terms of sound. Sound as a physical, material and ephemeral sensibility; sound as a polyphony of omni-directional voices; sound as distinguishability in synchrony; sound as a contingency in touch or in contact, sound as an invitation to engage with the physicality of things in terms of resonance and reverberation, in terms that avoid exhaustion, in terms circumventing empathy and its wish for epistemic colonization. Sound then as a stratum from which to experiment with new lines of flight regarding hospitality, but also as a framework to imagine and to make, as a set up whose sonic vocation is not to deny the visible or the visual, but to expand how we might see.
Thinking of hospitality in a sonic key addresses the political possibility of attuning us to those human or non-human voices that remain unheard or that sound outside a harmonic unity. But we would also like to bypass the moralizing circularity of harmony and discord; if hospitality brings the private or local life-world to a contingent and polyphonic environment of cohabitation, of public reverberation, then perhaps we can avoid the oscillation between friend and enemy by thinking of a sonic hospitality animated by comic, cosmic and cosmetic temperaments: codes of publicness that are active and performative, aware yet ironic, collective and cosmological, never prescriptive or taxonomic, and, then, perhaps opportune to dramatize on the stage of thought sonic forms of order and decorum articulating hospitable manners of sharing the cosmos.
