The phenomenon of hospitality - inviting the Other, making one’s own home available to the guest/foreigner/Other - has been continuously inflected by the issues of migration and the »refugee crisis.« The expanded and proliferated movements of economic or political migrants and refugees have re-enforced and re-defined the meaning of the home, and the opposition between »home« and »world,« although not new, is becoming stronger. This is because, during the conflicts that gradually spread over the territory of ex-Yugoslavia and in other new-born states in Eastern Europe, for hundreds of thousands of refugees any part of the world became a desired home. But the question is whether the new »home« was ready for these guests-turned-dwellers. The relation between cosmopolitans and refugees can easily be drawn in a metaphorical way, since there is barely anywhere where refugees are treated as equal »citizens of the world.« Nevertheless, later in this text, I will focus on a specific region, i.e. the Balkans, and, rather than presenting a discussion about the culturally embedded structure of hospitality that is usually used as a stereotypical means for circumventing the current problems with hospitality in this region, I will explore its relation to the issue of cosmopolitanism.

The opening-up of the terms »hospitality« and »cosmopolitics« to various theoretical discussions enables a critique of their received definitions, and emphasizes the importance of a critical re-examination of issues such as globalization, nationalism and multiculturalism. I want to argue that hospitality and cosmopolitanism can still be thought of in a positive, »unconditional« (using Derrida’s term) way. This is possible only if the tension between the Law and the individual practice of hospitality is continuously challenged.

In Greek Stoicism, which arose at the beginning of the first millenium of our era (and in the ideas of Kant, Meinecke or Zhdanov), the term cosmopolitanism stood for »world citizenship,« a kind of universalism that was to prevent »differences of nationality or class or ethnic membership or even gender from erecting barriers between us and our fellow human beings« (Nussbaum, p.3).

Paradoxically enough, the phenomena of exile and human migration from one part of the world to another are usually provoked by the Law and the State, owing to the inefficiency of governments in solving local social, economic and political conflicts amongst different ethnic groups over the right to one territory. Amendments made to bring existing laws up to date, the organization of group transportation, and the building of refugee camps tell of the State's predominant concerns regarding the well-being of the forced migrants. »It is not at all that the State knows nothing of speed; but it requires that movement, even the fastest, cease to be the absolute state of a moving body occupying a smooth space, to become the relative characteristic of a ‘moved body’ going from one point to another in a striated space. In this sense, the State never ceases to decompose, recompose, and transform the movement, or to regulate the speed«. (Deleuze and Guattari, pp.385-386).

Obviously, if hospitality is necessarily determined by the decision of the host to »open« the doors of his/her home to strangers, thus making it cosmopolitan - opened to the world and its problems - then the predominant involvement of the State cannot but affect the possibility of individual ethics of hospitality and cosmopolitanism itself. On the other hand, the culturally embedded practices of hospitality that Balkan people always boast about can hardly help in a serious refugee crisis, and states with more developed democratic, administrative and financial systems can more easily deal with such unpredictable »human catastrophes.«

However, what I want to argue here is that the increased hostility toward refugees partially derives from the over-involvement of the authorities as mediators who control and distribute the »optimal« degree of hospitality. In their concern about the inevitable issues of nationalism and preservation of the nation-state, the new-born states in Eastern Europe and the Balkans sometimes create an even more hostile form of politics toward the refugees than Western societies. When Jacques Derrida asks, »How can we distinguish between a guest and a parasite?,« it is in order to be able to make a difference between the two of them: »You need a law; hospitality, reception, the welcome offered have to be submitted to a basic and limiting jurisdiction«. (Derrida, 2000, p.61)

The State thus becomes the critic that is given the power to tell friend from foe, the wheat from the tares: I refer to the Greek root of the word »parasite« (Gr: »para-sitos«: »by the wheat«), which originally meant a guest who abused the invitation to sit next to the food, wheat, and at the same time to the etymology of the word »critic,« from the process of distinguishing between wheat and weeds: crisis. The tension between hospitality and cosmopolitanism derives from the conflict between the privacy of the home and openness to the world, from fears for the stability of the home if the problems of the world enter it.

In many ways Derrida has stressed that »If we try to draw a politics of hospitality from the dream of unconditional hospitality, not only will it be impossible but it will have perverse consequences«... but, despite this impossibility, »We continue to desire, dream, though impossible.« (Derrida, 1999, p.72) The aporia of absolute hospitality comes from the fact that it »requires that I open my home and that I give not only to the foreigner (provided by a family name, with the social status of being a foreigner, etc.) but to the absolute, unknown, anonymous other, and that I give place to them, that I let them come, that I let them arrive, and take place in the place I offer them, without asking of them either reciprocity (entering into a pact) or even their names«. (Derrida, 2000, p.25) The paradox of not being able to give a gift and still have it, of not being able to offer your home to the Other if you have already offered it to someone else, is related to the issues of »power and possession« (Aristarkhova, 2002, p. 2).

Yet the paradox of hospitality, according to Duformantelle, is that it is not confined to possessing a home: »To offer hospitality, is it necessary to start from the certain existence of a dwelling, or is it rather only starting from the dislocation of the shelterless, the homeless, that the authenticity of hospitality can open up? Perhaps only the one who endures the experience of being deprived of a home can offer hospitality.« (Dufourmantelle, 2000, p.56)

All these antinomies within the very concept of hospitality have been radicalized during the recent large fluctuation of different peoples and ethnic groups in divergent directions, especially after the dissolution of two big federal countries: the USSR and Yugoslavia. In such a situation the world is not always a »home sweet home,« but for some becomes a refugee camp or shelter.

In this context I should like to mention the long-term project »go_HOME,« which the artists Danica Dakic (Bosnia) and Sandra Sterle (Croatia) decided to carry out when they first met in New York in 2000. Despite coming from two opposing sides in the Yugoslav conflicts and living in two different European countries (Sandra Sterle in the Netherlands, Danica Dakic in Germany), they became friends and started working together. The title of their project simultaneously refers to the racist graffiti that were familiar to both of them - »Ausländer raus« - and to homesickness, to nostalgia, the need for a home in general. Being deprived of a home, of the possibility to dwell safely, and at the same time of being able to offer their home to any guests, Sterle and Dakic conceived the project as a »virtual home.«

Supported by the ArtsLink Program and the curator Katherine Carl, they rented an apartment in the art neighborhood Tribeca in New York (September 2001 - December 2001) and transformed it both into their home and a public space to which they invited many guests: friends, other artists, critics, curators and unknown visitors. Over the dinners, the guests and the hosts discussed different topics, e.g. »Architectures of Migration,« and how »the Internet makes ‘relocating culture’ or ‘reproducing home’ possible.« (Perlman, 2002, p.1) The interface of the web page shows a photograph of both artists, dressed as chefs, on the back of a van, resembling adverts for a catering or delivery company, a recipe book or TV programs on cooking. The ironical references and complex rhetoric of this image are directly related to hospitality, but the use of the photograph of a van and the »mounting« of their own photograph on the back of it obviously refers to movement, transition and migration. The issue of cosmopolitanism is thus contrasted with the local cultures; the issue of hospitality is opposed to the increased hostility.

The »virtual home« of Dakic and Sterle, meaning either the house that hosted the project »go_HOME,« or the »cyber home« - its web page, http://www.project-go-home.com, with the artists’ diaries, recipes, photographs and QuickTime movies on it - may be used as a model for the »unconditional hospitality« that Derrida has invited us to dream about. When Derrida discusses Michelet’s L’Amour, he accuses him of treating the woman as »an extreme hyperbole of fraternity - that is: being a ‘law beyond a law’...Woman is like absolute fraternity, she resembles it, like law beyond law, justice beyond justice. She is more than just.« (Derrida, 1997, p.239) Unfortunately, it is only within the framework of art projects that such a hyperbolization directed against the »master of the house, the host, the king, the lord, the authorities, the nation, the State, the father, etc.« (Derrida, 2000, p.15) is usually possible without being sanctioned by the authority of the State.

The subversion of the authority of the »master of the house« was also a dominant concept of the project »Artist(s) in Residence Program« by Luchezar Boyadjiev, but in a different way. When he was invited by the curators (Victor Misiano, Lorand Hegyi, Anda Rottenberg) of the project »L’Autre Moitié de l’Europe« (March 13-April 9, 2000, Galerie Nationale du Jeu de Paume, Paris) in 2000, the artist proposed a project that was a real test for the curators. His project consisted in convincing them to invite four other artists from different Balkan countries (at that time affected by the war in Yugoslavia): Uros Djuric - Yugoslavia, Sokol Beqiri - Kosovo, Slavica Janeslieva - Macedonia, and Alban Hajdini - Albania - to share his space in the gallery. Moreover, they were to stay as guests of the exhibition, »artists in residence,« for a month. The gallery space was used to exhibit Boyadjiev's works, but also to present those of the guests and as a site for pre-scheduled discussions and projections with other invited guests: artists, critics, journalists. The hyperbolization of »hospitality, hostility, hostipitality« is enacted through the inversion of the concept host/guest. Boyadjiev turned his position of invited guest into that of a host who invites other guests, thus testing out the »cosmopolitanism« of the curators and risking their hostility by forcing them to extend their list of artists and the exhibition budget. The institution of curator (which entails hospitality, since it opens up the doors of a gallery as a home to the invited artists) was examined in the most rigorous way: by forcing the curators of the international project to face the limits of their concept and their cosmopolitanism in a very specific world situation.

The project »Looking for a Husband with an EU Passport,« which Tanja Ostojic realized during 2001 as a series of posters and adverts on the internet, is a similar diversion within the realm of State and Law. It questions the possibility of there being cosmopolitanism in a world where Schengen rules are stronger than cosmopolitan desires. Ostojic’s movement of diversion already started during the first phase of the project, when she began communicating with the actual/virtual suitors through her web page with a photo of her naked and thoroughly shaved body; but it became more obvious when, in 2002, she actually married one of them, the German artist Klemens Golf. This marriage allowed to her to proceed with the project by installing an »Temporary Integration Project Office, 2002« in the Badischer Kunstverein in Karlsruhe (Uncertain Signs, True Stories, curator: Angelika Stepken). In the space of the gallery, Ostojic becomes a host by creating a home/office, which gives her the authority and power to offer hospitality, although she at the same time applies to the state authorities to issue her with a resident visa and thus give her the right to hospitality in her turn.

»Motel Jezevo« - an independent project curated by Nada Beros, (2001-2002) - deals with the problem of hospitality in the context of the problem of refugee camps in Croatia, in particularly the camp ”Jezevo,” which was established near Zagreb in 2000. Set up to prevent the spread of refugees in the Schengen countries, the refugee camp became a kind of surrogate home and the only hospitality offered to several thousands of refugees. The project itself is conceived as printed postcards and online-projects and texts that deal with many artistic attempts to take the notion of hospitality beyond the limits prescribed by the State, Law and other authorities in power. While Europe did import cheap and obedient labor during the sixties and seventies, now that the growth of capital is low, without big profits coming from the production process, the migrants - new citizens - are seen as a »threat« (Mocnik, 2001, p.1). The impossibility of hospitality in the case of the refugee camps becomes obvious. Dwelling, and therefore hospitality, cannot occur in every building, or in every world.

Jezevo and the other refugee camps, such as Stenkovec and Blace, built in Macedonia in 1999 for the »refugee flood« of about 300,000 refugees during the war in Yugoslavia, hardly provide essential existential needs. The relation between building, being and dwelling shows that being/thinking can happen only within something that is closed, sheltered and fenced in. Still, the power of possessing, although important, is not absolute; the lack of houses is not the only reason for »the real plight of dwelling« (Heidegger, 1971, p.161). Cosmopolitanism, the citizenship of the world, is one of the reasons for this plight. We have yet to learn how to dwell and think in the world, and who should possess the power to distribute the right to inhabit the world.

 

 

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