Eva Lin

Radical Hospitality
More than Human: Hospitality in Times of Crisis

Eva Lin

Director, mt.project, Taipei, Taiwan.

This presentation begins with a simple proposition: when we think beyond the scale of human life toward deep time, we may realize that we are not the owners of the world, but only temporary guests within it.

Seen from this perspective, the crises we face today are not only ecological, political, or economic. They are also crises of relation, as colonial histories, extraction, and accelerating temporalities continue to unsettle the relationships between people, land, ancestors, materials, and other forms of life. These fractures are not always visible, yet shape how responsibility is understood, and which lives and times are taken into account.

Drawing on Austronesian perspectives and Indigenous ways of knowing from Taiwan, the presentation asks how radical hospitality might be rethought once we begin from the assumption that humans are only temporary guests within a world that both precedes and exceeds us. From this position, more-than-human hospitality might become less a question of who else should be included and more a question of how human life might be understood beyond its usual scales and boundaries.

Rather than proposing another model of museum hospitality, the presentation opens a broader inquiry into what responsibility and care might mean when humans no longer assume themselves to be the center of the world.

Biography:

Eva Lin is an independent curator whose practice focuses on off-site and embodied methodologies, examining how curatorial processes engage local knowledge systems, social ecologies, and alternative epistemologies. Her projects frequently unfold in unconventional spaces, such as abandoned industrial sites, military infrastructures, temples, historic mines, and Indigenous communities, where long-term collaboration with local communities and cross-disciplinary practitioners forms a central part of her methodology, enabling the uncovering of overlooked or underrepresented narratives.

Lin approaches curatorial practice as a platform for knowledge production rather than representation, investigating the relational roles of materiality, landscape, and situated practices in shaping cultural narratives. Through interdisciplinary experimentation, she positions exhibitions as evolving processes of dialogue, field research, and collective learning, exploring how curatorial frameworks can function as relational infrastructures connecting artistic practice, community knowledge, and ecological contexts.

Her curatorial projects include the Austronesian Triennial 2027, the 18th Biennale Jogja KAWRUH: Land of Rooted Practices (2025); Sleepless in Stone (2024); You and I Live on Different Planets (Centre Pompidou-Metz, 2022, co-curated with Bruno Latour and Martin Guinard-Terrin); Taipei Biennial 2020–21 Public Program; Matsu Biennial(2022); The Upcoming Past (2019); and The Hidden South (2018).