HOMESTAY is delighted to be hosting seven international artists with local Dublin people from the exhibition GAME: The Future of Play at Science Gallery. GAME launches tonight at 6pm.

The artists being hosted are:

• Syed Salahuddin
• Kunal Gupta
• Brice Roy
• Simon Bach
• Tim Garbos
• Jason Wilson
• Nicolas Myers

Dublin Book Festival and the Royal Irish Academy are hosting three small talks on Domestic Life in Ireland, this Sunday November 18 from 12:45pm to 2pm at Smock Alley Theatre.

• Dr Rory Sherlock on Tower Houses
• Dr Conor Lucey on Georgian Redecorating
• Dr Ruth McManus on Suburbanization

HOMESTAY is celebrating the arrival of GAME artists in Dublin with a fireside dinner for the artists and their hosts next week. If you’d like to come, just sign up or register your interest in HOMESTAY via our online form. We are always looking for new potential hosts and people interested in the project.

HOMESTAY is seeking unique and wonderful local Dublin hosts to put up artists arriving in November to show work at the exhibition GAME in Science Gallery. Please fill in the above application form to express your interest in becoming one.

Have you got a spare room close to Dublin city centre (within 5km radius), wifi and a fondness for showing visitors around your city?

Artists will stay an average of 3 nights with their hosts and will be busy during the day. HOMESTAY thanks hosts with special events (film screenings and dinners), huge kudos and complimentary, limited-edition hospitality bags designed by artist Fiona Hallinan.

Sign up, and spread the word!

Yay! The Science Gallery have commissioned HOMESTAY to take place again, for their exhibition GAME in November. As part of this they invited me to contribute a guest post to their blog. You can read it on their site, linked above, or just here:

Festivals, gigs and art shows survive by tapping into invisible but very real networks of swapping and sharing resources. HOMESTAY is about celebrating and making visible these existing and essential networks of shared resources.

HOMESTAY is a project I initiated for HACK THE CITY at Science Gallery over summer 2012. It was pitched as ‘an experiment in hospitality’ and what I intended to do was house the artists vistiting to take part in the festival in local people’s homes instead of in hotels. It seemed necessary for an exhibition that was about hacking existing networks of a city to consider where the artists making work were going to live while they were in Dublin. I wanted to take the usually invisible logistical aspect of accommodating artists and make it an integral concept of the exhibition.

Alongside the practical side of saving resources, I wanted to create a more intimate experience of the city for the visiting artists. Hosts were encouraged to take their visitors to their favourite places in the city, share their knowledge of Dublin and offer them advice on good places to go. In my role I acted as a meditator between participants and the audience of HACK THE CITY; linking artists with potential hosts, making suggestions, ensuring communications ran smoothly, arranging meetings and also co-ordinating parallel events such as a reading group, film screenings on the theme of hospitality, and two large feasts for people involved.

HOMESTAY was conceived as an experiment because in setting out I genuinely did not know if it would be a good idea or not. There were many risks involved: what if I couldn’t find enough hosts, or if a host and artist dynamic didn’t work and people fell out? What if I caused more work for the gallery, or if the idea just ended up as a poorly organised version of Couchsurfing? Fortunately my worries were not realised and the project worked out to be a success, beyond my own expectations and, I think, those of Science Gallery. Now HOMESTAY has been commissioned for another stint, housing artists arriving to take part in the GAME exhibition in November. I’m hoping previous hosts will open their doors again to visiting artists, but moreso that this will be an opportunity for new hosts to share their space with an interesting visitor.

The wonderful COCOOK team stayed across Dublin in local people’s homes as part of HOMESTAY earlier this month.

cocook:

cocook team is ready for the Interactivos?’12 exhibition opening @ScienceGallery

photo by Christine Gates

Applications are open for another exciting Hack the City workshop by artists staying in Dublin with HOMESTAY!

Deadline: 10th August | Workshop: 14th – 19th August | Times: 10am – 8pm | Exhibition: 18th – 19th August.

Calling all architects, designers, artists, geographers and urban planners, we invite you to take part in the third HACK THE CITY lab. Building on Interactivos? and the IdeaLab, INTERSTITIAL INSERTIONS, provides you with an opportunity to work with leading architects, geographers and urban planners, who will guide you through a process for developing ideas for such city insertions. Outcomes of the workshop will be displayed as part of the HACK THE CITY programme and the Studiolab projects. Lead by Greg Keeffe (Professor of Architecture at Queens University Belfast School of Architecture), Dr. Nick Dunn (Author and Principal Lecturer at the Manchester School of Architecture) & Dr. Alma Clavin (urban planner and geographer working at the School of Geography and Archaeology, NUI Galway) this 5-day workshop, will focus on developing workable design propositions for in-between and leftover spaces in the city. Participants will be lead through a process which critically reflects on theoretical and practical methodologies and approaches for urban design.

The workshop will open to between 18-24 participants. Workshop coordinators and technical support will be available from 10am – 8pm for the duration of the 5-day workshop. Admission is free. No materials or costs for production will be provided but assistance with visual design, mapping and critical development of the projects will be given. Application should be submitted to: Teresa Dillon, Curator, Hack the City or email Teresa.Dillon@sciencegallery.com. Full details on the call and workshop process can be found at: www.sciencegallery.com/interstitialinsertions