EXPO

‘Philoxenia’ can be translated as ‘Welcome’. Still, this modern translation wouldn’t fully fathom the various overtones of this ancient Greek concept. There is more to ‘Philoxenia’.

 

We find the same ‘philos’ in ‘philosophy’. Before Plato turned Philosophy into a quite neutral ‘love of knowing’, Pythagoras first used the term in a more ethical mindset: as a ‘philos’ you are a friend, you have a mutual connection to live a better life together. Let’s bear the latter in mind.

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Then we have the ‘Xenia’, from ‘Xenos’, ‘stranger’. This word more commonly known from  the compound ‘Xenophobia’, the fear of strangers, or the exact opposite of ‘Xenophilia’. Here again, we get a little help from the philosophers. Derrida points at Plato’s dialogue ‘Sophist’, when Socrates enters into a conversation with a stranger and realizes that in fact he too, is a stranger. Everyone is a different one. That’s exactly why we should be friendly with strangers, for he is the other part of our selves.

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This is the spirit we find in the works of Colin Waeghe. He looks at worlds and feels estranged, because as an artist, he has an eye to see *the other being of things. Still, an eye won’t get the paint on your canvas. Colin also has the manual intelligence to conceive this in his own fashion. Forms which make us think, about the other and ourselves. Welcome!