Our Hospitality

Project curated by Rodrigo Alonsoby
Our Hospitality  is an exhibition project conceived expressly for Castellón, consisting of installations and video-works based on the interaction of a group of international artists with the spaces, situations and inhabitants of the city. It borrows its title from the film of the same name by Buster Keaton, which casts an ironic gaze on pointless rivalries and hard feelings.

The starting point for the project is research on the city, its inhabitants and its visitors, based on the Greek concept of hospitality recently recovered by contemporary philosophy. Following that idea, the works on show have been created from collaborations and exchanges with the inhabitants of Castellón after setting a whole series of social, cultural, personal and emotional flows and links in motion. On another note, the proposal attempts to uncover a different image of the city through the contribution of those foreign gazes that arrived to Castellón in search of collaboration, reciprocity and shelter.

The artists gathered in this exhibition  (Liliana Basarab, Milena Bonilla, Oriol Guillén, Gregg Smith and Claudio Zulian)   the double condition of the temporary worker and the tourist. They arrived to Castellón with the commission to produce a specific piece of work, but at the same time they were asked to engage in a discovery of the city, to maintain their foreign gaze, to work from their own observations and feelings rather than resorting to history, specialised opinions or archives. In other words: their work has taken a situationist turn, guided by attentive gazes and reflective itineraries, with the aim of bringing to the fore all the city expresses through its streets, its daily occurrences, its corners, its people.