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    Ex-Situ. Recreative Hospitality - Jordi Vivaldi

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    The document discusses how climate change is causing places like Höfn, Iceland to rise while places like the Marshall Islands sink, displacing populations. It proposes that we now live 'ex situ' as involuntary travelers in our own homelands. It explores the concept of 'recreative hospitality' as a telluric and circular practice that renews relationships between hosts and guests, human or non-human, through openness and vulnerability rather than empathy or comprehension.

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    Ex-Situ. Recreative Hospitality - Jordi Vivaldi

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    The document discusses how climate change is causing places like Höfn, Iceland to rise while places like the Marshall Islands sink, displacing populations. It proposes that we now live 'ex situ' as involuntary travelers in our own homelands. It explores the concept of 'recreative hospitality' as a telluric and circular practice that renews relationships between hosts and guests, human or non-human, through openness and vulnerability rather than empathy or comprehension.

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    The document discusses how climate change is causing places like Höfn, Iceland to rise while places like the Marshall Islands sink, displacing populations. It proposes that we now live 'ex situ' as involuntary travelers in our own homelands. It explores the concept of 'recreative hospitality' as a telluric and circular practice that renews relationships between hosts and guests, human or non-human, through openness and vulnerability rather than empathy or comprehension.

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as pdf or txt
    4 views3 pages

    Ex-Situ. Recreative Hospitality - Jordi Vivaldi

    Uploaded by

    jordivivaldipiera
    The document discusses how climate change is causing places like Höfn, Iceland to rise while places like the Marshall Islands sink, displacing populations. It proposes that we now live 'ex situ' as involuntary travelers in our own homelands. It explores the concept of 'recreative hospitality' as a telluric and circular practice that renews relationships between hosts and guests, human or non-human, through openness and vulnerability rather than empathy or comprehension.

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
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    of 3

    Ex-Situ

    Recreative Hospitality

    Jordi Vivaldi

    *Note to reviewers:
    The essay was submitted on October 2, 2022 to the call for entries for the
    Architecture Writing Prize issued by the Architecture Foundation.
    It belongs to Category 3 (Design and the Climate and Biodiversity Emergencies).
    The body consists of 498 words.
    Ex Situ: Recreative Hospitality 2

    The Icelandic city of Höfn is slowly rising above the sea. Almost two centimeters
    every year. Some proportionalities are at work: the rising temperatures melt the
    neighboring Vatnajökull glacier; the pressure pushing down on the ground
    underneath is relieved; the ground bounces back. And there’s more: as the glacier
    loses mass, the gravitational effect pulling the sea towards them is lessened and the
    water in the port flows away. Where does it go? Far, very far away. Geologists tell us
    that the farther away you get from the melting ice block, the more water is
    accumulated: for example, at 12,000 kilometers south-west, where the shoreline of
    the Marshall Islands thins out.

    The port-city of Höfn and the Marshall Islands maintain inverse proportionalities. As
    one rises, the other sinks; as one expands, the other contracts; as one dries up, the
    other floods. Can we shout Terra Firma? The land is in motion. Sometimes it is
    faster than we are: the people living in Höfn or the Marshall Islands may be
    displaced, but not because they have gone anywhere; rather because their place
    has left them. They have not moved, but they may no longer be on the same site.

    Living ex situ is perhaps one of the most significant conditions of our present day.
    Involuntary travelers on a journey across unknown ecosystems, we rediscover
    ourselves as visitors in our own homelands. Planetary migrants without leaving
    home; motionless cruisers, hosts and guests at the same time. Aren’t there
    unheard-of forms of hospitality at work here, playing in a terrestrial key?

    Hospitality. The Greek xenia: a form of pact, a contract. A quest for openness that
    now expands hospitality’s human circumscription to posit it in terms of human and
    non-human affiliations. In terms that are certainly biological, organic, but also
    mineral or geological, climatic, perhaps even algorithmic or robotic. In terms that are
    terrestrial, and thus, circular or circuitous, circulative. Is it possible to conceive
    hospitality as a movement working in cycles? A telluric practice that, in its spiraling
    motion, may no longer be prescriptive or compassionate, but recreative, that is, both
    joyful and variational; the reformulation of hosts and guests on each other’s terms,
    the possibility of a second birth through the figure of the foreigner, the telluric
    traveler. We are ex-situ. Da capo. Can we design recreative forms of hospitality to
    promote new cycles of openness between hosts and guests regardless of their
    human or non-human dimensions?
    Ex Situ: Recreative Hospitality 3

    A quest for being “open to” while remaining in need of being “opened by” is a quest
    for integrating while remaining vulnerable, fracturable. For accommodating the
    unknown and the unfamiliar, yet without exhaustion, without compression or
    comprehension, without empathy and its desire for epistemic occupation. “Being
    with” rather than “being as”. Recreation as syntonization and attunement, as
    reverberation between outlanders. Hosts and guests; categories in circularity and
    circulation, in multiscalar permutation. In tune and in tone. Figures turning around
    and turning inside out. Poles dancing and whirling among lands in motion.

    Leslie Zhang, Vois Sur Ton Chemin, 2017.

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