Other concerns raised by the IWBWWMI group were: - why invite somebody at the last moment to partake in the project if we all took the trouble to come to Lisbon a couple of months ago to get to know each other and discuss this event? - why if the guest is be spontaneous should her arrival be announced beforehand? - why did the artist not contact the group directly? if she were an artist who had read or heard about the project and contacted the group directly out of a personal enthusiasm then probably yes. But to have somebody sent to Lisbon, out of the curatorial needs of a set-up (the swap between Blue House and ALMOSTREAL) with which this project has nothing to do was seen with skepticism. Interestingly, Jeanne's proposal was not based on any curatorial need, but rather a wish to make a connection between Amsterdam and Lisbon and the Blue House and alkantara. As such, a spontaneous collaboration which would also coincide with the ideal of the stage 3 event. Although the arguments against the proposal are credible, the general perception that Jeanne's proposal was only made for the needs of Blue House and ALMOSTREAL which have 'nothing to do' with the stage 3 event, suggests that there was a certain set of notions and criteria for collaboration already in place. This meant that the ideal of ad-hoc collaboration, and for hosting a guest from outside the group was limitied. Indeed it begs the question what, in the context of IWBWWMI, could be hosted as an ad-hoc collaboration?
"...on my first day learning about the actual programmatic time frames of the different stages, I saw that an event was about to happen as part of Stage 3. I made a proposal, I felt it was good to ask for a place for an extra guest, in this case Daniela from the Blue House to participate in this event in order to start fostering connections between the different stages, to look into new and unexpected connections, to open an underground railroad through ALMOSTREAL. After the stage 3 participants received my proposal, and after an initial congratulation on our swap and a note on discussing this proposal with the whole group as part of the process, a reaction came back that used words as ‘curatorial-setup’, ‘interference’, don’t mess with a preset process and so on. . To me this echoed the discussion in Ljubljana and a lot of unspoken distrust toward intentions could be read between the lines and also seeing the involvement from your site as a hierarchal imperative. I like the letter Daniela wrote in which see expressed that from her side there was only an openness and readiness to embrace the unknown and engage with a group, knowing they were already in a collective process. The question one could put here if a process when start is a fixed entity and if interference from the outside would damage such a carefully created set of relationship as it was put by the group. Here we hit precicely a pain point of the notion of Hospitality."Jeanne van Heeswijk, email correspondence November 2007. More on how and why this almost collaboration did not become a realised collaboration can be read in the following email correspondence between Jeanne van Heeswijk, Mark Deputter and Igor Dobricic 7-16 November 2007