 Today, as a curator based in Warsaw, Poland, where just two days ago the streets were filled again with the biggest nationalist march in Europe, I would like to talk to you about the need for mutual hospitality and how I learned it over the years from my residents, coworkers and comrades. Let us start by pointing out that no place is given to us for keeps, including those that some of us are privileged to call a home, while many people in the world have been forced to leave theirs behind. Despite the fact that the humankind has been doing it utmost to dominate and appropriate the planet, it is no more than just a guest here. We share the planet with over 7.7 billion people and 1 to 2 million animal species. Considering that fungi have existed on earth for at least a billion years, humankind is in a sense the journey come lately and it was precisely the symbiosis of fungi with plants that was one of the engines that powered evolution, paving the way to our own world. If we accept it in its entirety as common asset, mutual hospitality becomes the obvestance. It is the case, however, that today, as Zygmunt Bauman pointed out, it is the social and class divisions and humiliations characteristic of a culture based on ownership and market forces that are considered natural facts, whereas the fact that we are all the children of mother nature is disregarded. As Bauman says, nature commands us to view reciprocal hospitality as the supreme precept we need to and eventually will have to embrace and obey in order to bring to an end the long chain of trials and errors, the catastrophes the errors cause, and the devastations the catastrophes live in their wake. The paradox of hospitality rests in the fact that it is a positive value but it cannot be imposed on anyone. It must stem from the individual's own inner need, viewing our planet as the shared home of all creatures, animate and inanimate nature. We note that our species, albeit a relative newcomer, has behaved in an exceptionally cavalier way and rooted in our experience is a profound hierarchy of unequally distributed privileges. Hospitality is, to follow a dictionary definition, the cordial and generous reception of a guest. To welcome a visitor is to be open to everything that may come with their arrival. This may be something unexpected or not something that we had hoped for, thus before feeding or sheltering the other, it is important to ask him or her what they expect from us. I'm co-creating the residential program in Ujazdowsky Castle almost from its launch in 2003, but nobody gave me a manual at the outset of residential hospitality. In due course I came to understand the practice of empathy, care, gratitude, mutual respect and consideration as well as a lot of invisible work put in are what fuels the kind of residency I would like to curate. The successive generations of residents have been the ones to teach me mutual hospitality. Out of the many, I have chosen a few episodes that remain my source of inspiration. Arie. In winter 2017, I became aware that two residents from Brazil were complaining of a presence in the Castle Residency Studio presence, where they were staying. Luckily I knew a person who was experienced in negotiations with beings that exists outside of our notion of materiality. He made contact with the spirits and the presence ceased to oppress the women. The women no longer experienced nighttime episodes of pressure in their chest as if someone is sitting on me, the sudden inexplicable slamming of doors and windows or objects falling down of their own volition. After a few weeks later, guests from Indonesia came to stay in the same studios. During a winter talk, Arie asked me with a smile, do you know Marianna that we are living with spirits? This was obvious for me, so concerned I asked. Yes, I do know. Is everything all right? Yes, said Arie. A few days ago, I was lying on my bed looking at the table a few meters away and suddenly one of the speakers that were standing on the table crashed to the ground. I knew what that meant. I made my introduction out loud, speaking in Indonesian. I said that I was just a temporary visitor and that I respected the presence of the spirit. I asked it not to haunt me. We sometimes see kind of shadow out the corner of our eye, but things don't fall anymore. Juliet. Juliet Delventel was our first chef in residence back in 2011. She taught me the conviction that shared preparation of food and communal eating are the precious meeting space. She shared with me her dream of a big long table shaded by trees and being able to build a use and use a simple field kitchen in the open air. We found the master potter and the right place next to the castle. A few weeks of preparation later, a table was erected under the trees as well as a superb massive bread oven, a little comical in its shape, but it functioned perfectly. Juliet was the caring hostess of many unforgettable evening, but above all, she created a space in which the activity can continue. Shared meals, cooking and evening spent in that space have become a staple of our residential program. I need to skip something. Exhibition hosts. Marianka, now we will take you on a guided tour. What was what I was told one day by the guardians of the exhibition, Gotam Kroyonk things we do together that I curated, when I came to meet up with them. Their offer to give me a guided tour came as a surprise and I was truly moved by it. All of a sudden, by taking the initiative and volunteering as host of the space, they altered the relationship between the curator, institution and auxiliary workers who usually stay in the shadow. They took me around my own exhibition in the most authentic and poignant way possible, transporting the narrative into the sphere of their personal experience and relationships with the works and practices represented in the show. And I followed them behind with my eyes misting over. At the end of the tour, I asked whether they would consider an action replay for the public. They said yes. And this is how one of the most interesting and popular events of the public program came into being. I'm sorry, it's so tragic. The House of the Collective. Well, maybe that's going to be the last slide. The House of the Collective. The Indonesian artistic collectives often start with inviting a group of friends home. And home is often an open space also for strangers. This is an ongoing and less non-cronk. The custom of idly hanging around, squirting and smoking together and chatting so long that in the end there is nothing left but to stay the night. In my culture, to stay the night is an intimate act that shows a close relationship between host and guest. I very much like the vision of an art institution as an open house. To finish, let me get back to Zygmunt Bauman. He wrote, can't observe that the planet we inhabit is a sphere and thought through the consequences of that admittedly banal fact. As we all stay and move on the surface of that sphere, we have nowhere else to go and hands are bound to live forever in each other's neighborhood and company. Keeping a distance, let alone lengthening it, is in the long run out of question. Moving around the spherical surface will end up shortening the distance one had tried to stretch. No one knows how much time we have left on the spherical planet of ours, but if we are to continue, it will be not only in the company of other people but certainly also in the proximity of Fungi. Taking a closer look at Fungi, our co-inhabitants on planet Earth, one can say that they pioneered radical hospitality. Mekoriza is a symbiotic association between certain Fungi and plants. Mutual hosting is the underlying strategy that makes survival possible. The radical hospitality of the Fungi towards humans begins with preparing the Earth for everything that is familiar to us. When billions of years ago, Fungi began to colonize our planet, the first land Fungi derived mineral nourishment from rocks, turning them into the soil that now feeds us. Today, when the nation states diligently guard their non-porous borders, while capitalism and other oppressive systems in which we have to come to live are introducing here more segregation hierarchy, it is hard for us ordinary people to practice planetary hospitality. An interspecies symbiosis could become the new face of radical hospitality based on an unconditional economy of giving under which we would agree to coexist on the planet in mutual respect of our differences opposing capitalism. When the world around us is made keen on making us give up faith in hospitality and interpersonal relationships appear powerless in the face of big politics, it is precisely the interhuman and interspecies mutual hospitality that can become the practice of everyday resistance. Only when we dare to activate it individually and collectively, we will be able to put real protest into practice. Thank you.