The Right to Host: Commoning the Private
2024

Co-initiated and curated by Reyhaneh Mirjahani, DAAR, and Hosting Lands

Supported by Nordisk Kulturfond, Bikubenfonden and the research project Oikos – Climate and Care in the 21st century, University of Copenhagen.

Photos by Negar Latifian

The project explores how rural and leisure-oriented spaces in Denmark and Sweden might be transformed into commons—shared cultural infrastructures governed collectively and accessible across lines of difference. Hospitality is reframed from a private or charitable gesture into a political act: a practice that redistributes power and asserts the right of marginalized communities to shape the environments they inhabit. Central to this is the question of how collective cultural spaces marked by diversity can be created and sustained within the rural.

Anchored in a summer house in Stavsnäs, Stockholm Archipelago, the project unfolds through public programs and gatherings that open the space to new narratives and practices. Here, the rural is both site and lens: while often imagined as pure, leisurely landscapes of retreat, it also exposes the social, racial, and economic boundaries that govern access to land, rest, and the right to host.

Through conversations, situated reflections, and collective inquiry, participants will explore how self-care is shaped by neoliberal and racialized contexts; how infrastructures of commoning might redistribute resources and expand access; and how hosting can operate as a radical political tool rather than a gesture of generosity. Together, the gathering aims to open the summer house as both a physical commons and a site for collective imagination, solidarity, and transformation.