Bétonsalon is hosting Sylvie Fortin for a three-month curatorial research trip, structured in two phases (February and June/July 2026), combining research, experimental curatorial writing, and the development of collaborations. The aim is to synthesize her ongoing research on the intersections between hospitality and the economy, a line of inquiry that has informed her practice since 2022 through dialogue with contemporary artistic practices. From a theoretical perspective, the project examines the debt that economics and finance owe to hospitality—that is, what economic and financial thinking has borrowed from the philosophical concept of hospitality and its social practices. In parallel, it explores the economies of hospitality as they are enacted within contemporary artistic and institutional practices.
Conducted in collaboration with artistic organizations over the past several years, this iterative research has enabled her to investigate the effects of current (post-neoliberal) political and economic reconfigurations on local artistic, curatorial, and institutional practices in Buenos Aires, Venice, Lisbon, Bergen, and Vancouver. The residency at Bétonsalon will allow Sylvie Fortin to expand this field of inquiry and to convene an interdisciplinary research group focused on the debt of economics and finance to hospitality. This group has a threefold objective: to identify blind spots in her project, to stimulate the research of its participants, and to experiment with a range of meeting and exchange formats.
In the long wake of COVID-19, the post-neoliberal shock doctrine has imposed a series of unprecedented economic experiments and “concepts” which, fueled by algorithms, AI, and machine learning, aim to produce a secure, predictive future—for a minority. At the same time, the once sacrosanct economic concept of GDP has already been sidelined in favor of a far more incisive notion of “national wealth,” measured through “natural capital.” A profound revolution is currently redefining the value of every entity—living or inert—and value itself.
Sylvie Fortin’s research (as well as the exhibitions and publications that will follow) is both a response to this sweeping socio-economic reorganization and a counter-proposal. Through certain contemporary artistic forms, it traces the contours of resistance at the very heart of hospitality. The present moment calls for new ways of sensing and thinking, new intuitions and speculations. It calls upon our collective creative capacity to make these transformations perceptible. We must deploy new methods, test unfamiliar formulations, and propose experimental, solidaristic curatorial formats.
A constellation of questions fuels this research. What role has the (philosophical) concept of hospitality played in the emergence and dissemination of economic notions such as profit, interest, inflation, and speculation? What can we learn from the forms privileged by economics (or the representations attributed to it), such as the bubble, the cloud, the crash, and the graph? How are these forms transmitted, received, and interpreted? How do contemporary artists explore inflation, debt, currencies, speculation, bubbles, crashes, derivatives, and related phenomena in aesthetic, economic, political, and social terms? How do economic notions such as debt, inflation, and speculation become embodied? How do they infiltrate language, attention, perception, and desire? How do they permeate social relations and shape political imaginaries? How does the city—an incubator of forms of being together, now targeted by rampant gentrification—figure in artistic practices, whether as site, stage, mirage, symptom, motif, material, image, or rumor? What can hospitality teach us about financial instruments such as derivatives, debt trading, futures, and options? Can hospitality equip us to oppose the violence of ongoing restructurings? Can it open pathways for resisting neo-feudalism and fostering new forms of collectivity?
This research will lead to a draft essay, the conceptualization of a constellation of group exhibitions at varying scales circulating across Europe and the Americas, and a publication.