What can established art institutions learn from small-scale organizations’ approaches to invitation, hosting, and publicness? In Beyond Caring: Para-hosting as Curatorial Escape, Paul O’Neill explores how new forms of invitation can reimagine host–guest relations and open escape routes from fixed institutional roles. Moving between speculation, critique, and proposition, the essay introduces “para-hosting” as a cooperative methodology of generosity and self-organization without absorption. For O’Neill, para-hosting is a form of escape that enables transformative possibilities beyond existing power structures within institutions and otherwise.

[publishers’ note]