After working independently on various choreographic works Galit Criden and Laura Kirshenbaum are now presenting Songs of Hostess, a semi-nomadic studio held online and in contemporary art libraries around the world. 

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Songs of a Hostess is a Body-Knowledge based practice that centers on the relation of the feminine body to knowledge (the maternal body among other things) and its surroundings. where creative people, mothers, and artists come together to share WHAT THEY KNOW AND DO in order to develop together a new kind of feminine knowledge. 

 

How? 

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At the core of their practice lies collaborative work that stems from the desire to imagine a different kind of reality.

Dismissing the idea of the one master leading a group, here there are no teachers or students but rather a group of co-learners, that reinforce the value of personal knowledge, and experience. Song of a hostess presents various online and in-body sessions within the context of archives and libraries. Inspired by consciousness-raising in the context of second-wave feminism, the essential element is the use of collaborative- interdisciplinary processes for the transformation of individual awareness from a personal to a political frame of reference. Thus, we address various topics such as family, immigration, movement, longing, libido, nostalgia, history, and their gestures in every practicality.

 

Another core idea we embody in our practice is concerned with the practice of hospitality as knowledge. This knowledge we speak of is carried by the hostess herself, as it is being practiced - preserved and transmitted for generations on end, as means of procreation, creating safety, communities, encounters, and personal growth.   Rather than thinking about hospitality as gender-based, linked to maintaining and sustaining a household, we wish to reappropriate the term. To isolate and decompose aesthetic, political, maternal, and self-care elements that lay within it and by doing so to identify new systems of knowledge. Where gestures, experience, support, and exchange come to life and are significant and valuable. 

 

landscaping

 

In a series of performative pop-up events, Songs of a Hostess will set up temporary spaces where the general public is invited to come and share, come and be, come and learn, rehearse gestures and ancient traditional techniques, as well as visualize alternatives together.

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