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134 Contested Values and Critical DebatesInterventions: Position Papers and DialoguesI’ve just come from Tel Aviv, where I’ve organised a series of exhibitions,workshops, interventions and discussions at the Tel Aviv Museumof Art under the title ‘Host & Guest’, based on Derrida’s little book,Of Hospitality. No doubt, there’s a connection, something in me, thatgoes to the same well in which caring and hospitality, generosity andsupport dwell. The Latin curare, from which we derive the verb ‘tocurate’, is also a <strong>for</strong>m of care; quite literally, it means ‘to take careof’, and, in fact, the signification in the Medieval church of the wordcuratus was the one who takes care of souls. Of course, here too wefind the complexity of oversight, control, and dogma mixed withhumane desire. And Derrida is quick to point out the complexitiesfeatured within hospitality – its own proto-Indo-European rootgiving rise to the words host, hostile, hostage, hospital, guest andghost. What, then, is buried within the gesture of care, what truedesire to listen to the one who needs as it is joined to the biopoliticsof control, of segmentation, bureaucratisation and commodification,of an insidious taking away alongside a hospitable giving? Derridabegins his book in a typically Derridean interrogatory <strong>for</strong>m, thinkingof the guest who arrives, the one who seeks the care of the host.He asks: ‘Isn’t the question of the <strong>for</strong>eigner a <strong>for</strong>eigner’s question?Coming from the <strong>for</strong>eigner, from abroad?’ And I want to make thissmall copula between figures by asking: ‘Isn’t the maker of knowledgeone who always comes to the <strong>for</strong>eign land of both knowledge andmaking, who asks <strong>for</strong> the hospitality of knowledge, to know and tomake, to come to this place of knowledge’s <strong>for</strong>eignness and be givenwelcome as the <strong>for</strong>eigner – a new maker in a strange land, <strong>for</strong> themaker is always on the outside of what is to be made?’ The thing thatis not yet but is yet an immanence of its made-ness is on the otherside of this welcome.This is an old story, even as I elide it, of <strong>for</strong>eigners who come to anew place, just as artists arrive at their own knowledges and makingas they pass through a system in which their private terra infirma issubmitted to the encounter of care in a school. In essence, a schoolis simply a place of gathering where those who give this <strong>for</strong>m of careand those who take it meet; a space of care that is never without itsstructures of power that set out its claims <strong>for</strong> legitimacy. I want toremind you of the continuity of this story, not simply from the almosteroticised fetishisation of hierarchical order implicit in Raphael’spainting, The School of Athens, but specifically as the ordering ofart knowledges established as practices that offer, at the same time,this tradition of a teaching care and the archaeological strata, theslow layering and restructuring of economic, sociopolitical and

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