Garp Sessions 2026

30 July – 9 August 2026

that which passes between us

Dear,

Today felt perfectly temperate, more green around, the days getting longer. We’re sitting in our homes, talking through our screens about the state of the world, relationships, future(s), patience, seasons, and trust… and in these conversations, we found ourselves thinking of you, especially for this year’s Garp Sessions in Babakale. What have you been thinking about? We’ve been thinking about relations that never quite start or end, and we would be happy to think together with you, through the materials of love and life, through the gesture of hosting. This letter is our first gesture, our invitation to you. 

Hosting can be many things: being held, being entered, inhabited, or fooled… In Latin, the word hospes has a double meaning: ‘one who hosts’ and ‘one who is hosted’. Paul B Preciado writes in his recent book, Dysphoria Mundi, “Who is the host of whom? It’s all a question of perspective”. This led us to think about different kinds of symbiosis: mutualism (where both benefit), commensalism (where one benefits and one is unaffected), and parasitism (where one benefits at the expense of the other). These allow us to consider how we might also host what arrives uninvited, and to move beyond transactional and conventional ways of being together. To host is to touch, to transform one another. But as Karen Barad keeps reminding us, when two bodies meet, they do not fully touch or merge but hover in proximity, sensing one another through forces and distances. What we call contact is already entanglement, an intra-action. The guest or visitor is not outside of the host, but already within it, just as the host is altered by what it receives. It is always about being in relation, being transformed, being affected… but to remain open or to accept that we are always already open, in relation, dependent, even multiple might sound a little foolish. Still, in tarot readings, the fool appears as the misfit, the rule-breaker, the stranger, the jester, the one who “challenges the structure of the day in service of new life” (Jessica Dore, Tarot For Change). What might we challenge or transform in light of those thoughts? Do these vague but deep connections also move you?

In practice, accepting this invitation means entering a shared condition of hosting and being hosted. Drawing from feminist writings on microbiology, quantum physics, friendship, and performance, as well as our own practices, we will explore the uncomfortable intimacy of relationality, the incoherence of the self as it moves through and beyond the body. Each of us will host a day through constructing the conditions to compose a temporary collectivity between July 31st and August 9th 2026, at Garp Sessions: the hang-out, the cooking, the performance, the reading, the screening, the dance, the swim, the walk, the trap… And in return, each of us will be hosted for the rest of the days. What passes between us may not always be information, but something harder to grasp, another way of knowing and learning. What we are proposing requires trust, and trust is always negotiated through exposure. To trust is to be open; to host is to risk; to be hosted is to risk, too. There are no guarantees: you might be convinced or not, held or not. The fool is not just the one who does not know, but the one who enters anyway. To accept this invitation is, in some way, to become a fool with us, as a way of remaining open, receptive, and in relation. 

Since what we see and hear can no longer be fully trusted, hosting becomes a place to practice belief and doubt, together. We hope you can make it.

Warmly,
Ekin & Dimitris

Facilitators

Anı Ekin Özdemir

Dimitris Chimonas

Participants

Zeynep Yılmaz, Demetris Shammas, Margaretha Jüngling, Belinda Papavasiliou