Hospitality: Space, travel and translation is a three-day symposium and set of collaborative events investigating contemporary preoccupations with location, mobility, travel and translation as key terms within the fields of visual culture.

The central platform of the project is a public symposium at Fondazione Adriano Olivetti on Saturday 20 May. Invited guests include cultural theorists and artists who collectively illuminate cultural positions related to spatial praxis, urban geographies and architectures, social and community networks, cultural translation, participatory practices, performativity and mobility. Hospitality also presents commissioned projects by formazero, Arabeschi di latte and Cesare Pietroiusti, which utilise walking, conversation and food as ritual forms to frame communication and collaboration beyond traditional institutional structures.

'Hospitality' is used here as an interrogative term to consider both public space as a bounded zone, in which the stranger is subject to the codes, rules and regulations of its host (city or state), and the common right of any stranger to any space; that is, the ethical imperative that the host receives whatever and whomever enters its domain. Considering the fractious state of the public domain today, it seems timely to re-evaluate the currency of 'hospitality' as a term to examine how public space is regulated by its authorities and 'performed' by its users.

No longer can cultural theory provide a stable sense of spatial integrity issuing from the 'West', as it becomes increasingly difficult to ignore that every centre or home is someone else's periphery or diaspora. Hospitality considers the possibility that artists, curators, cultural workers and audience can operate in this space of ongoing, contingent and restless translation and negotiation, where the margins navigate and occupy the centres. Travel, or any movement across borders, reorients 'home' as a space of coming and going, 'between-ness', unrest. How, then, is the potential of this space being articulated and utilised within cultural practices? How effective are participatory practices in producing new cooperative or open structures? Has 'participation' become merely a formal term? How has a growing awareness of spatial politics and practices created a shift in the production, dissemination and reception of art? How have art institutions adapted to visual practices focused on the public realm? In the context of such questions, Hospitality is envisaged as a forum for reflecting on given formulations of space, travel and translation as touchstones for contemporary critical studies.