SUBJECT: Cooperation. URGENT.

From 2025 to 2026 Lilian Hipolyte (director of the exhibition and residency space Nafasi Art Space) and Emma Beverley (director of the residency space HIAP – Helsinki International Artist Programme) were part of Shaping Crossroads–a peer-to-peer exchange programme on intercontinental mobility and cultural cooperation between Africa & Europe.

SUBJECT: Cooperation. URGENT.

Dear -INSERT INSTITUTION- Director,

My name is -NAME- and I am the Programme Manager at -ORGANISATION- in -CITY-. We came across -INSTITUTION- whilst researching organisations with strong experience in international residencies.

We are currently preparing an application for -INSERT EU FUNDING PROGRAMME- which has a submission deadline in just under two weeks.

One of the call requirements is that the partnership includes an organisation from -INSERT REGION- and we have not yet identified a suitable partner. We wondered if you might be interested in joining.

The proposal is already well developed. We believe your institution could contribute through hosting residencies, participating in meetings, and acting as the budget holder.

If this is something you might consider, could we arrange a meeting this week?

Kind regards,

-NAME-

Many of us working in international artist mobility know this email before we’ve even opened it.

A deadline is approaching. The consortium has a hole in it. Somebody has realised they need a partner from the “right” country. A frantic search has taken place. And suddenly an organisation you have never met would like to enter into a three-year relationship with you.

Also, could you possibly hold the budget?

It is a curious way to begin a relationship.

As residency hosts, we spend a lot of time thinking about hospitality. We welcome people into new cities and countries. We meet artists at ferry terminals and airports, explain public transport systems, find missing keys, source obscure materials, make introductions, share meals and try to make unfamiliar places feel navigable.

Yet when it comes to relationships between our organisations, we often begin somewhere completely different.

We begin with eligibility criteria.

Which countries are represented. Who can be the lead? Who can hold the money? Which organisation fulfills which requirement. Who can deliver Work Package 4.

Only much later do we discover whether we actually enjoy working together.

This isn't really the fault of the person sending the email. Most of us have probably been that person at some point. We are responding to the systems we work within.

But as residency hosts, it has made us think about what international collaboration might look like if we approached it with the same care that we try to bring to hosting an artist.

When hospitality becomes logistics

Residency organisations are extremely good at logistics. We have to be.

There are contracts, budgets, visas, access requirements, reporting frameworks, travel bookings, accommodation arrangements and schedules. Behind almost every beautifully described international exchange is somebody with a spreadsheet quietly trying to work out why the train ticket costs way more than anticipated.

Institutional partnerships are not so different.

Before we understand another organisation's ambitions or context, we often need to establish whether they can manage a budget, administer EU funds, deliver the agreed outputs and meet the reporting requirements.

These aren't unreasonable things to establish. Particularly when public money is involved, accountability matters. But there is something revealing about the fact that administrative trustworthiness is so often established before almost anything else.

Sara Ahmed has written about the ways institutions shape the encounters that happen within them. Some ways of working fit easily into institutional structures; others have to be translated and adapted before they are recognised.

We see this clearly in international partnerships.

A funding programme might describe a partnership between European and African organisations as reciprocal, while the programme has already decided quite a lot about how that reciprocity will work. The reporting language, financial rules and timeline have been established. Even the definition of a successful outcome has been established.

One partner therefore arrives at the table carrying more than their ideas. They are also carrying the rulebook.

This is where the language of “capacity building” can become uncomfortable. It can quietly assume that capacity needs to be developed in one direction: towards a particular administrative system, institutional model or understanding of professional practice.

Sometimes what we call a lack of capacity is actually a lack of willingness on our part to recognise a different way of organising things.

Our first conversations could start elsewhere.

Before establishing whether a partner can manage the budget, we could establish what we want to build together. Before agreeing outputs, we could understand the pressures and obstacles each organisation is navigating. Reporting standards could follow a conversation about what meaningful change would actually look like in each context.

The budgets and contracts will still have to come. Unfortunately, nobody has yet discovered a form of radical hospitality that exempts you from an EU financial report.

But perhaps they don't have to be where the relationship begins.

First, feed people

When the Shaping Crossroads fellows came to Nafasi Art Space in Dar es Salaam, we were fed.

Not because lunch was listed as Output 2.3.

Because people had arrived, and feeding them is the obvious thing to do.

There were communal meals. Sometimes the wider Nafasi team pulled up chairs. Sometimes eating spilled into informal spaces that had never been officially designated for “networking”. The food was home-cooked, plentiful and shared.

Nobody ate alone.

This sounds like a small thing, but small things tell you quite a lot about how an organisation understands hospitality.

Ukhona Ntsali Mlandu describes African hospitality as having a particular texture: welcoming someone's presence as an honour rather than a burden. There is generosity in that idea, but also recognition. Someone has chosen to come into your space, and their presence changes it.

The philosopher Emmanuel Levinas wrote about ethical responsibility as something that comes before contracts and reciprocity: we recognise another person before establishing the terms of the exchange.

A shared meal makes this idea remarkably practical.

It says: there is space for you here before we have established what you are going to produce. There is space for you at this table, not only in the programme.

We don't mean this as a simplistic comparison between “African hospitality” and “European hospitality”. Nor are we suggesting every international cooperation project can be fixed by providing better snacks.

(Although better snacks rarely hurt.)

What interests us is what food communicates.

When resources are limited, feeding somebody is a decision about what matters. It says nourishment – literal and relational – is part of the work.

Something also happens when people stop performing their institutional roles long enough to pass food across a table.

We have sat through plenty of networking sessions designed to make people connect. Often the conversation over dinner afterwards does a much better job.

The room is not level

Of course, being friendlier to one another does not make structural inequalities disappear.

We can eat together, laugh together and genuinely like each other while still participating in a partnership in which one organisation controls most of the money.

Organisations enter international partnerships with radically different levels of infrastructure, financial security and mobility.

One might have unrestricted operational funding, permanent staff, an accountant and enough cash flow to wait six months for a reimbursement.

Another might be working project to project, with a small team simultaneously producing the artistic programme, writing funding applications, answering emails and fixing the broken toilet.

Then we put both organisations into a proposal and call them “equal partners”.

They might be equal partners in ambition, expertise and commitment. But they are not necessarily equal in the amount of risk they can absorb.

A delayed payment can be annoying for one organisation and existential for another.

A visa rejection can mean reorganising a meeting for one partner and being excluded from it for another.

A requirement to pre-finance activity might barely register for one institution and make participation impossible for another.

Even the apparently neutral expectation that everybody should travel to the same place for a meeting lands differently depending on passports, salaries, caring responsibilities and borders.

If we are serious about reciprocity, we have to become better at acknowledging these differences rather than politely pretending they aren't there.

Equality does not always mean everyone contributes the same thing.

Sometimes a fair partnership means the organisation with greater financial stability carries more of the financial risk. Sometimes it means meetings move rather than people. It can also mean recognising that knowledge, relationships, access to communities and local expertise are resources just as significant as cash.

And sometimes it simply means allowing a partner to articulate what they need rather than arriving with our own idea of what “support” should look like.

Trust is extremely inefficient

The trouble with trust is that it takes a long time to build.

European funding infrastructure, meanwhile, prefers speed.

A call opens. A deadline appears. Consortia assemble. Roles are allocated. Budgets circulate. Letters of commitment are signed.

Three organisations that have never met are suddenly promising to spend the next four years “developing sustainable transnational collaboration”.

Sometimes it can work.

But there is a difference between a partnership that functions and one that has depth.

Richard Sennett writes in Together that cooperation depends not simply on organisational systems but on social skills: listening, mutual recognition and learning how another person works.

Anyone who has worked in a long-term partnership knows this.

You slowly learn who answers emails immediately and who absolutely does not.

You learn who needs to talk an idea through and who wants it written down.

You discover what somebody means when they say, “Yes, this should be possible.”

You learn when to push, when to wait, when somebody is under pressure, and when a disagreement is actually about something else.

None of this appears in the partnership agreement.

But it is often what makes the partnership work.

We have experienced collaborations that began with visits: someone came to the space, met the team, ate with us, saw the working conditions and understood the context before there was a funding application on the table.

The difference is enormous.

Not because the visit produced a measurable output, but because it produced knowledge of one another that a proposal document cannot replicate.

For us, this has become one of the green flags of international collaboration: a partner who wants to know you before they want to apply for something with you.

The relationship is not something the funding enables.

The relationship is the infrastructure that makes the funding useful.

Create the space

There is another thing residency hosts know well: the temptation to over-host.

Somebody has travelled a long way. Their visit is short. We want them to meet everyone and see everything.

So we make a schedule.

9:00 breakfast meeting.

10:00 institutional visit.

11:30 presentation.

12:30 lunch/networking.

13:15 site visit.

14:30 roundtable.

16:00 debrief.

18:00 dinner with stakeholders.

By day three, everybody is quietly fantasising about being alone in a hotel room.

A schedule tells a visitor something about what we think their time is for.

Jacques Derrida's writing on hospitality distinguishes between hospitality governed by rules and expectations and a more radical openness to the guest – an encounter that cannot be entirely managed in advance.

We recognise this from hosting. Some of the most important conversations happen in the gaps.

During our time together in Germany, where we prepared and facilitated a workshop for the DECONFINING conference, part of the Theater der Welt festival, the moments that shifted our thinking rarely happened inside the formal programme. They happened walking through the city. Waiting for transport. Sitting too long over dinner. Getting slightly lost.

There is something useful in the idea of the flâneur here: moving through a place without needing every moment to have a predetermined purpose. Wandering. Noticing. Talking.

In institutional life, this can feel suspiciously unproductive.

But often it is where the actual work happens.

Leaving space in a programme for rest, wandering and unplanned conversation communicates something important. It tells a visitor that they are not only there to produce something for us.

The person matters more than the schedule.

Hosting the relationship

Perhaps international collaboration can be thought about less as building a consortium and more as hosting a relationship.

That doesn't mean abandoning contracts, budgets, safeguarding, accountability or governance. Hospitality without structure can create its own problems, particularly when power is unequal.

Instead, it means being more deliberate about the kind of relationship those structures are there to support.

For us, as residency hosts, some of the answers are surprisingly ordinary.

Visit each other before writing the application, if possible. Eat together. Understand the pressures an organisation is facing, not only what it can deliver. Talk about money openly. Notice who is carrying the risk. Leave gaps in the programme. Don't assume institutional capacity only looks one way. Make space for disagreement.

And don't schedule a meeting during lunch and call the sandwiches hospitality.

Most importantly, spend time together when there isn't a deadline.

Funding programmes come and go. Priorities change. Calls disappear. Political relationships shift. Projects end, and final reports get uploaded somewhere nobody will ever voluntarily read them again.

Relationships can last much longer.

As residency organisations, we already know this. Our work is built around the idea that bringing people into a place, giving them time, sharing resources and creating conditions for encounters can produce things that cannot be predicted in advance.

Perhaps we simply need to extend the same logic to one another.

Trust takes longer than a funding cycle.

Care is not the soft part of international cooperation that happens after the serious work of budgets and governance has been completed.

Care is part of the infrastructure

And sometimes international cooperation really does begin with a spreadsheet.

But, we’d recommend starting with a home-cooked lunch.

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