SLIDE 1 COVER

With this talk I would like to think of the question of hospitality in relation to the practices of
spatialization that it involves by conjuring up three spatial codifications of the limit.

SLIDE 2

I would like to start with two complementary quotations from Coccia with respect to house.
- A house is a volcano that erupts an spacetime that is alternative to the planet,
a non terrestrial reality.
- We can inhabit the world only by confusing ourselves with it, The house is also
a platform accommodating multiple forms of biospheric connectivity, since it is
composed of the very same matter as the planet.

This tension allows us to go beyond the dichotomic consideration in architecture of the

interior as culture - civitas and the exterior as nature - barbarie.

This is particularly relevant in the context of the Anthropocene, since it consists precisely in
mixing beings commonly indexed to the cultural or natural categories that typically go hand
by hand with the architectural distinction between interior and exterior.

SLIDE 3

It is in light of this home’s ambivalence that I want to think about hospitality.

The interplay between host and guests in fact manifests the home’s amphibian vocation of
- Interrupting planetarian flows (remoteness)
- Densifying planetarian flows. (intimacy)

Hospitality is deployed as a play of hide and seek: the guest might be warmly
accommodated within the host s home, but its alterity is not fully assimilated by the guest,
since this would cancel out the home singularity with respect to the planet.

In this context, hosts and guests don't aim that much at representation but at resonance,
not that much at grasping each other but at practicing with each other in an operative
complicity void of epistemic colonization.
SLIDE 4

I would like to bring here Rick Dolphjin’s idea of becoming a target, which means
To seduce the outside forces and to be ready to undergo the most radical change.
Being opened by instead of being open to. Dolphjins thinks that the gesture of being
open to is still humanist, anthropocentric and perhaps even paternalist. Because it is
the “I” who first recognizes this otherness (on his conditions), and decides to take
action by opening this door that was closed before. Instead, to be opened by coins a
readiness to be born anew.

This permits to think hospitality not that much as embracing the other, but as a game of hide
and seek in which we are more interested in knowing what does it mean to be with another
rather than what does it mean to be as the other.

In this context, can we think of hospitality beyond the folkloric human scene of a remote
foreigner being lodged in a welcoming home?

Can hospitality involve commitments of human and non-human affiliations that are creative
rather than comprehensive or compressive?

What would that mean to set in motion spaces of hospitality to live together well?

I would like to frame the question of hospitality as a question of limits, given that the limit
invokes an ambivalent formulation of junction and disjunction that resonates with the
home’s amphibious nature. For this,

SLIDE 5

I would like to bring to the forth the spanish philosopher Eugenio Trías, whose work is
devoted to the limit. Trias understands the limit as differential sameness and
autoreferential difference.

In Trias, the limit joins and disjoins, or joins what it disjoins, because it is in itself internal
differentiation: at the very moment where the limit marks the frontier of what it limits, it
necessarily certifies the existence of the beyond to which it refers.
SLIDE 6

The fact that Trias does not reduce the limit to a more or less permeable device of
restriction, suggests to recreate the limit in more codifications. I would like to do so in light
of 3 questions:

- Where does something end? Limit as a contour, limitation

- How far does the appetite of something go? Limit as action, as power,
limitrophy
- What lies within the limit itself? Limit as milieu, as a space in itself, liminality

The interactions that these three codifications might orchestrate in order to accommodate
human and non human beings is what I refer to with the expression Cosmetics of
hospitality.

SLIDE 7

Cosmetics here means conductive forms of order and decorum (techne) addressing all
what can be considered without exhausting it all (cosmos).

They are universal, since they aim at addressing any reality, but each one of these
codifications is embodied in its own lexicon and grammar.

They operate thus simultaneously, hosting what they conceive rather than revealing what
belongs to what.

Precisely because of this universal yet embodied vocation, they need to be caught red
handed and in action rather than ideally listed in a manual or illustrated through a case
study.

So this is why I would like to lodge ourselves in the Roman inauguratio as a set up, as a
field of experimentation. I would like to reactivate the foundational rites of Roman Cities in
a new light to disclose new vectors of hospitality. I would also like to briefly connect this to
some contemporaneous spaces.

SLIDE 8

The inauguratio as described by Joseph Rykwert offers an advantageous site for this:
Rykwert approaches the Roman towns appealing to associations established by
assonance and rhythm, rhyme, alliteration, allusion or simply physical resemblance:
he presents the inauguratio as a conceptual model that is explicitly cosmological,
connecting the foundation of the city to mythical, physical, ceremonial, geometric and
mathematical dimensions.
SLIDE 9

The inauguratio starts with the Contemplatio, the demarcation of a quadrangular area of

the sky (templum) to unveil the validity of the site by the augur’s contemplation of the

movements of birds and clouds. The area is first vertically projected on the ground,

condensed as a diagram, subdivided and oriented according to the sky. Second, the

diagram is horizontally projected to the surroundings.

SLIDE 10

In words of an augur: this tree marks the boundary of my templum to the left, or marks

the boundary to the right, but what is important is not where the boundary is, but the fact that

it is this or that particular tree, wherever it might be.

So, while the first projection of the augur is exterior to the sky and marks a rectangular

ideal division as if the territory would be an homogeneous cake, the second is closer to

the cut of the butcher, a cut that pays attention to the consistency of the body.

We have at work here two different codifications of the limit, one that is the idealist peras of

Plato, the limit-contour that separates and divides, that defines being by non-being, and the

other is the limit-action of the stoics, that is not that much concerned about where

something ends but about what something is, and thus, until where it arrives.

SLIDE 11

Deleuzes explains this with the example of the forest. Where does the forest end? He will tell

us that it ends where the walker is no longer afraid of the forest’s darkness. This is the

limit-action of the forest.

SLIDE 12

By instrumentalizing limits that both separate and nurture, the augurs’ projection of the

celestial realm over the terrestrial was alchemical rather than representational, for it was

meant to reconstitute – rather than illustrate – the cosmos on Earth.

Due to this alchemical character, the augur’s projection differed from the proiectionem (to

throw forth), being more closely related to the projeccioun, an alchemical term referring to

the act of transmutation carried out by casting a powder onto molten metal.

This might lead us to interpret hospitality’s hide and seek as an alchemical transmutation:

to offer guests and hosts with a pleasant stay, means providing them with the conditions of

possibility for reconstituting, in their own terms, the environment in which they are hosted.

Hospitality appears thus a reconstitution under a different light more than as a

comprehension or a compression.

SLIDE 13

The question for example in Patricia Johanson’s project is not that much where its shape

ends, but how far its transmutative power arrives, how far does it propel the capacity of

the guest’s species to reconstitute the host’s territory (or vice versa).

Where the limit-contour is a spatial device concerned with limitation, the limit-action is

concerned with limitrophy, a nurturing limit attending to appetite itself rather than to the

appetite of traversing a boundary.

But there is a moment, coming back to the inauguratio, in which the rituals needed to set

the contours of the city, a categorical cut between civitas and barbarie of religious import.

This can be read as what Coccia defined as a volcano that erupts a space-time that is

alternative to the planet, a reality that is not terrestrial. An inner exteriority. There is no

hospitality without this.

SLIDE 14

In the Roman inauguratio, this was the role of the sulcus primigenius. Rykwert explains to us

that the furrow was dug with a share, and where they designed to make a gate, there they

took out the share, carried the plough over, and left a space; for which reason they

consider the whole wall as holy, except where the gates are.

What we can see is that junction and disjunction between civitas and barbarie was

orchestrated in light of a third element, the gods, which appear as well as hosts/guets.

SLIDE 15

One can see there were two axis operating in this interaction:

- An horizontal axis between civilized and barbarian populations

- A vertical axis between the territory and the celestial kingdom.

This might lead us to conceive hospitality as a triangular permutation, a menage a trois:

host and guest traverse each other’s mediums in light of a third element, which can later

permutate its position as a guest or a host, but it does not occur in the vacuum.

SLIDE 16

In today’s forms of hospitality in which terrestrial and aquatic mediums interpenetrate

each other we can see that this interaction cannot be reduced to an affair between guests

and hosts: the inhabitation of earthly beings within an underwater environment in the Nemo

Garden occurs through a classificatory limit-contour that is formally and materially exterior

to hosts and guests, thus constituting hospitality as a triangular process that includes in

this case the human being as a third element.

To cross borders or boundaries is not just a pact between hosts and guests, but it

involves an element external to both of them.

However, in the case of the roman inauguration, the sulcus primigenius was dug in parallel

to the ritual of digging a hole called mundus and considered the hearth of the town.
SLIDE 17

Rykwert considers this hole as the mouth of the underworld. It is interesting the notion of

mouth because it is a limit between interior and exterior, but also a space in itself, a milieu.

The mundus was:

- A limit mediating between the world and the infraworld

- A milieu, an inhabitable subterranean chamber encircled by a stony limit contour

where to enter in contact with the gods of the infraworld.

The mundus was thus a limit-milieu, a recodification of the limit in which the limit-contour

takes on thickness and becomes a land in itself, a territory of (dis)encounters that is

inhabitable, susceptible to cultivation, and worship.

However, the mundus’s limit-milieu was not conceived as a form of in-betweenness – it

was not merely located between the terrestrial and divine realms – rather, it belonged to the

former while referred to the latter.

In its belong/refer structure, the limit-milieu is a spatial device primarily concerned with

liminality (passage) rather than with limitation (circumscription) or limitrophy

(nutrition). One can also see this liminality in the Pomoerium or in the Limes.

Instead of being codified as a symmetrical device in which both extremes, in their pure

external negativity, are completely identical, the limit-milieu causes a failed reflection, a

reflection that is not specular, an asymmetrical reflection. The liminality of the limit-milieu

accommodates a space that is always in passage, unbalanced, in tension.

The limit-milieu is not as fascinated with traversability as it is with inclination: by

accommodating the gods within the mundus and the temple, the Roman limit-milieu

appeared as a daimonic territory of (dis)encounters tensioned by the fact that the presence

of the hosted gods was, despite their intense resonance with the humans, always tangential

and unstable, never fully revealed, never fully established on site.

This intimate yet remote accommodation might conceive of hospitality’s as a tuning of

voices, a syntonization of sounds and rhythms that does not capitalize on empathy and

its insistence on epistemic occupation, but on a calibration of tones and behaviors.

In this context, hospitality would not be that much concerned about what does it mean to be

as the other (empathy), but to what does it mean to be with the other (tuning).

SLIDE 18

As noted by Vinciane Despret, empathy nurtures a subject–object relation in which the

subject feeling empathy is transformed, but in an extremely local manner since, it does

not stimulate the permutation of the object’s role in order to be activated as a subject.

By putting themself in the other’s position, the empathic hosts ends up totalizing the guests

(or vice versa) by claiming that they have been understood, that “what stands under them”

has been elucidated.

Within this context, the limit-milieu’s liminality shifts the focus in hospitality from empathy

and its fantasy for cognitive conquest to tuning and its embrace of operative

complicities – tuning as the momentary yet systemic concordance of voices, as the

transitory calibration of rhythms and sounds.

SLIDE 19

One could ask if the imbricate platforms and paths of the living root bridges in India could be

read in light of these intense yet non-exhaustive tunings among human and non-human

beings. Resonances that are deployed during centuries in between different species that live

with each other without cognitively exhausting each other. Coming back to Innaugur.

SLIDE 20

The mundus had a twofold vocation: it was the spring of fertility, the source of the town-s

existence, but also the place where each inhabitant threw earth from their old home

town.The Mundus was both a force of expansion and contraction, systole and diastole.
SLIDE 21

And this expansive power was extending in the city through a grid: the orientation of this grid

was drawn in reference to the order of the universe, for the decumani are set in line with the

course of the sun, while the cardines follow the axis of the sky.

The deliberate arbitrariness mediating between the bounded spaces of the cadastral grid

and its future occupants again invokes the exteriority characteristic of the limit-contour; the

boundaries of the Roman dwellings were exterior to their inhabitants due to the

randomness guiding the association between them.

Since the purpose of these divisions was to register and fiscalize possessions, what

mattered to the surveyors was neither the materiality of those lots nor their

potentialities, but their extensio and their belonging.

So the roman city was a superimposition of a habitational arrangements: the urban area was

both sacralized by the mundus’ irradiation of the gods’ powers and neutralized by the

surveyors’ treatment of the territory as a tabula rasa.

SLIDE 22

While the Roman settlement was accommodated by the gods through the terrestrial

reconstitution of the cosmos in which the city was hosted, the city hosted the gods in

return within the mundus and the temples devoted to them. This reciprocal and

multi-scalar interplay of hosts and guests conceives hospitality as a translocal model of

cohabitation – that is, a form of coexistence in which the Roman, barbarian and divine

inhabitants are identified with more than one location at the same time.

The gods host the roman city in the cosmos, but then the romans host the gods in the

mundus. This might lead us to conceive hospitality as a matryoshka working in cycles; to

provide the guests with an agreeable stay would mean to foster mutual forms of
accommodation in which hosts and guests are not only mutually grafted onto each other,

but also hosting and hosted by other beings operating on different spatio-temporal scales.

SLIDE 23

One might see this matryoshka and ciclical form of hospitality in projects such as After Alive

Ahedad, where each biological, algorithmic or geological “pattern has its own capacity

and potential for change, its own unintentional variations. Because there are so

many in proximity, they affect each other; they deregulate or re-regulate, they are

ones inside the others. They synchronize as well as engage in conflicts or

dilemmas.”

SLIDE 24

Just to finish with the innauguration, the expansive power of the mundus goes until the

Limes, the frontier of the Roman Empire with and inhabited by the Limitanei. We can see

thus that the Roman City is placed within two limits, the mundus and the limes, which are in

fact limit-millieu, spaces in themselves. The extreme limits of the roman cities are in

fact limits operating as well in a vertical axis, mediating between Divine and Eartly

Realms and Civic and Barbar realms.

SLIDE 25

To speak about Cosmetics of Hospitality is thus to speak about how different spatial

codifications of the Limit might accommodate different vectors of hospitality.

Both in the Roman inauguratio and in the spatial excursus presented here, these

codifications deploy numerous spatial interactions in which they embrace, thicken,

project, expand, replicate, scale up, sediment, interrupt or even cancel each other.

The ambivalence of these overlaps defies hierarchies and historical privileges by

practicing the confusion of simultaneity, but they also stand up in order to offer novel

vectors of thought, in this case of hospitality.