This year, we’ve spent time thinking deeply about hospitality and care in collaborative practice, running two salons that explored these interconnected themes.
Our April salon on hospitality featured a collaboration with Christus Nobrega, an artist and scholar from Brazil visiting through the ANU College of Arts and Social Sciences Global South Visiting Scholars Fellowship. As part of two months of conversations, Christus developed a ‘hospitality experiment’ activity for the salon—a conceptual art offering informed by projects he’d done with students in Brazil. Participants imagined hospitality experiences they could offer others, creating invitations using coloured paper, pens, and crayons. The results were wonderfully creative: a lemonade street party, sharing a secret place, lego plant propagation, and a crowd favourite—the passenger mix tape invitation, where the host would drive if the guest provided the music. Exploring these invitations sparked rich discussions about reciprocity, community, and collaboration itself.
The conversations were so generative that we stayed with the theme for our mid-winter salon in July, this time focusing specifically on hospitality and care. We’d been thinking about what care looks like in different contexts, and about the responsibilities that are expected or assumed in relation to care. The idea of nourishment emerged, so we made our offering literal: two giant pots of homemade soup, shared with guests in the old Wig and Pen at the music school, with winter sun streaming through the windows.
Our guest speakers brought diverse perspectives on care. Sociologists CR spoke about care in relation to medicine and feminism, while Gavin Smith reflected on wildlife reptile care and migration. Artist RM shared experiences of adapting a collaborative exhibition project during the pandemic, keeping care and connection at the core.
What struck us across both salons was how hospitality and care are both practice and metaphor in collaborative work. The soup-making wasn’t just symbolic—it was embodied care, the labour made visible. The hospitality invitations revealed how much we negotiate reciprocity in collaboration, often without naming it. How do you make care visible in your collaborative relationships? What gets counted as work, and what remains invisible? These questions linger with us as we continue this exploration.