Snaebjornsdottir/Wilson/Brown

Transmission: Host is a series of chapbooks derived from an annual lecture series organised by Fine Art at Sheffield Hallam University. Each week a host selects, presents, and looks after his or her guest. A critical engagement between host and guest is assumed. There is an ethics of hospitality, of making the stranger welcome. A host has a standard of conduct, and historically, hospitality has been seen as a code, a duty, a virtue, and a law. In this second series, each host invited a guest who was a stranger. Stranger' implies one who is not known, but also incorporates the foreigner, or indeed, the odd/eccentric/uncanny. Following Jacques Derrida, the stranger is one who is irreconcilably 'other' to oneself, but with whom one may co-exist without hostility, to whom one must respond and to whom one is responsible. The stranger reminds one of the other at the heart of one's being.