Jordi Vivaldi

Hospitality; a form of pact, a contract, a play of hide and seek. Care and generosity towards the figure of the unknown, the foreign, the xenos, but also a political commitment, a form of openness to and by an-other involving as well the community, the generation, the genealogy. A collective -if not cosmological- endeavor that today, in light of the Anthropocene’s miscegenations, demands to trespass the human circumscription characteristic of the Greek xenia in order to conceive hospitality as a commitment of human and non-human affiliation: What does it mean to be hospitable on a planet shared with zoe/geo/techno modes of inhabitation? How to let them come, to let them arrive? How can they take their place in our place? In brief, how to give them, to give ourselves, spaces of inhabitation that are hospitable enough to live together well?

Architecture, philosophy, mythology, art and science will nurture this seminar’s fascination with these questions by offering us tools to ramify and recreate the notion of limit. If inhabitation implies the production of spaces within spaces, the presence of limits holding flesh together-in-their-difference seems pivotal. The differential sameness and autoreferential difference of those limits will be connected to hospitality by expanding their usual architectural role of enclosure in order to foliate into three codifications: the limit-contour (Where does something end?); the limit-action (How far does the power of something go?), and the limit-milieu (What territories might be opened within the limit itself?). The numerous turns, overlaps, collisions, angles, jumps and intertwinings operating between these codes of limitation, liminality and limitrophy will orchestrate the cosmetics of hospitality proposed in this Seminar: articulations of spatial techniques (techne) seeking to collect everything that can be considered (cosmos) while producing new variations and unknown resonances regarding pleasurable forms of cohabitation.