Hospitality, Secrecy and Other Useless Movements – Interview

The following interview began as a series of questions to Thaemlitz and Rassel by Eva Rowson, Curator of Landmark at Bergen Kunsthall, and developed as the transcript for their radio show “Hospitality, Secrecy and Other Useless Movements”.

Laurence Rassel once used the term ‘useless movements’ to describe how feminist practices have been displaced from mainstream notions of what is productive and of value. But ways of working dismissed as ‘useless’ by major culture industries can be transformed into an incredibly useful uselessness. Both Rassel and Thaemlitz have made careers out of exploring these possibilities as methodologies for survival. In a conversation presented as a live radio show from Bergen Kunsthall and through Oslo-based feminist radio station radiOrakel’s broadcast, Rassel and Thaemlitz set out to explore the tensions and contradictions arising from the simultaneous needs for care, hospitality and non-intervention in today’s everywhere topic of inclusion.

When the constant requirement to be inclusive is understood as a product of a dominant ideology, through which mass exclusions and injustices are still happening, what could hospitality mean as a model for organisation? And as major culture continues to ignore the violence towards those who feel as a minority group until they make themselves visible and heard within the mainstream (through a rhetoric of speaking up and occasions such as PrideTM), how can the historical functions of closets and secrecy inform attempts at organising and avoiding co-optation?

Image Courtesy of the organisation