ÉSAD • Grenoble
25 rue Lesdiguières — 38000 Grenoble — FRANCE
E: simone.frangi@esad-gv.fr
E: katia.schneller@esad-gv.fr
T: +33 (0) 4 76 86 61 30
Pratiques d’hospitalité is a heterolingual platform devoted to critical research and political imagination, initiated and coordinated by Simone Frangi and Katia Schneller at l’École Supérieure d’Art et Design •Grenoble •Valence. Based on the interpolation of artistic, curatorial and theoretical practices, this platform employs the notion of hospitality as a critical tool for questioning, from a post-national and non-eurocentric perspective, subjectivation processes linked to territorialities and from there to rethink the role of sexuality, gender, ethnicity and class in global phenomena of power and inequality. Through the production of artistic and curatorial projects, it asserts the need of formulating a post-capitalist ethics as its epistemic horizon and attempts to produce a theoretical and political discourse suitable to the complexity of contemporary geopolitical modes of existence and of the historical conditions of the emergence of social subjectivities. In the morphology of this project, hospitality is approached as a temporary and mobile trope or as a discursive figure which helps to reformulate the notions of territoriality and locality in the age of nomadism, global circulation, flux economy, radical creolization and diasporic phenomena. The aim of the program is to differently evaluate the fiction of institutionalised borders in favour of an idea of flexible citizenship. Pratiques d’hospitalité is grounded on the analysis of the concrete and polysemic structure of hospitality dynamics, on both micropolitical and macropolitical levels. It aims to question, in a theoretical approach that associates transnationality and intersectionality, the complexification of the sense and desire of belonging to a specific territory in the age of the post-humanist crisis of the rhetoric of fixed roots and indigenous ancestry. Revisiting some pivotal questions aligned with the sexualized body, ethnicity and class in their direct relationship with the question of territorial inscription, this program puts to the test the auto-fiction of Europe as a space of cultural homogeneity. The notion of hospitality shows in fact that a strictly topological and static definition of the subject is impossible and that every locality renders itself in non-linear and interbred forms.