For Every Guest, Someone Stays Home
Who gets a seat at the table—and who keeps it standing? Drawing on life at Fix in Art, the author explores the exclusions behind cultural hospitality, the daily work of care, and what it takes to make a table truly shared.
For Every Guest, Someone Stays Home
Who gets a seat at the table—and who keeps it standing? Drawing on life at Fix in Art, the author explores the exclusions behind cultural hospitality, the daily work of care, and what it takes to make a table truly shared.
Published October 1, 2026
Author: Dela Christin Miessen Co-founder, echoes residency
Credit image: Maria Giovanna Giugliano
We loooove tables in cultural work. We invite people to the table, we give people seats at the conference, we organize roundtables, and bring something to the table. We gather, exchange, share. The table has become such a comfortable metaphor for participation and agency that I sometimes wonder if we have stopped questioning the table itself - and its edges.
Like feminist scholar Sarah Ahmed in Queer Phenomenology (2006), we want to think about ordinary objects such as tables seriously. Drawing partly on phenomenology, she asks us to notice how bodies are oriented toward objects and how objects themselves organize what bodies can do. A table isn't simply a neutral thing sitting in a room: its position, use, and history participate in arranging bodies in space. And every invitation to it, produces an outside. There is a guest list, even when we don’t intend to write one. There is a costume, language, a time, a place, a menu, a price of getting there. There are bodies that know how to behave at this particular table and bodies that have been told, repeatedly and in different ways, that it was not built for them.
So before we talk about our sobremesa, we ask ourselves: who built this table and who decided it was a table at all?
I arrived at Fix in Art in 2020, to work in a cultural center. A few weeks later, culture - as we had known it - had to stop. The doors closed, productions paused and the space rearranged itself. And so did we: tables meant for workshops became packing stations. We collected food, sorted it, preserved some, packed it into boxes and bags, and distributed it through solidarity networks to people in need, whose access to already fragile infrastructures had become even more precarious during the pandemic. Instead of becoming useless, the cultural space became useful in a different way.
During this time, cooking at Fix in Art has taught me many things: how to eat with others, how to accept food made by others, how to receive food without explanation or debt. The power of communal eating as ritual of survival in crisis. It has also taught me about privilege; the privilege of choice, of mobility, of my hunger as a temporary inconvenience rather than a structural condition. That hunger is about more than an empty stomach. We hunger for safety, for knowledge, for home(s), for recognition, we hunger to belong. However, romanticising food as something that “brings us all together” risks erasing the very conditions that determine who has access to food, who produces it, who serves it or who can refuse.
When Fix in Art lost its long-term Thessaloniki home in 2023 they moved to the small fisherman’s village Epanomi. Moving from a city to a village is not just a change of address. It meant leaving behind an audience, a public, a rhythm.
By moving toward self-sufficiency, Fix in Art put a great deal of effort into making sure there would always be a place to put a table down: no longer a given, but something to be worked for and protected. Infrastructure becomes the most visible when you lose it. Finding - and re-building- a new community is something we are still, today, in the middle of doing.
When we founded echoes residency for Fix in Art in 2024, these were some of the many thoughts we had. We wanted to think about a residency as an infrastructure: We wanted to collectively unlearn and relearn and do so from the ground. We wanted a space to listen and create, that we care about. We had gone looking for care in the curatorial, and it was quickly revealed to us that here, care meant maintenance: taking care of each other. One of the ways of doing that has been through food.
We were also, quickly, faced with a clash between the abundance of some resources and the scarcity of others. That clash is where maintenance actually lives: care isn't the warm idea of it, it's the daily, unglamorous work of matching what's overflowing to what's missing. Even without the urgency of a pandemic, it turns out still to be about maintenance. We set out to think about caring, kind, loving ways of curating - and found ourselves, again, back at the same table.
Every residency brings different appetites, allergies, ingredients and skills and every resident, ultimately, creates the sobremesa. I would like our sobremesa to be served at a table where everyone knows they can come without being invited at all. And if I invite you to a table, have I already decided that it’s mine? Or can it become ours?
Published October 1, 2026
Author: Dela Christin Miessen Co-founder, echoes residency
Credit image: Maria Giovanna Giugliano
We loooove tables in cultural work. We invite people to the table, we give people seats at the conference, we organize roundtables, and bring something to the table. We gather, exchange, share. The table has become such a comfortable metaphor for participation and agency that I sometimes wonder if we have stopped questioning the table itself - and its edges.
Like feminist scholar Sarah Ahmed in Queer Phenomenology (2006), we want to think about ordinary objects such as tables seriously. Drawing partly on phenomenology, she asks us to notice how bodies are oriented toward objects and how objects themselves organize what bodies can do. A table isn't simply a neutral thing sitting in a room: its position, use, and history participate in arranging bodies in space. And every invitation to it, produces an outside. There is a guest list, even when we don’t intend to write one. There is a costume, language, a time, a place, a menu, a price of getting there. There are bodies that know how to behave at this particular table and bodies that have been told, repeatedly and in different ways, that it was not built for them.
So before we talk about our sobremesa, we ask ourselves: who built this table and who decided it was a table at all?
I arrived at Fix in Art in 2020, to work in a cultural center. A few weeks later, culture - as we had known it - had to stop. The doors closed, productions paused and the space rearranged itself. And so did we: tables meant for workshops became packing stations. We collected food, sorted it, preserved some, packed it into boxes and bags, and distributed it through solidarity networks to people in need, whose access to already fragile infrastructures had become even more precarious during the pandemic. Instead of becoming useless, the cultural space became useful in a different way.
During this time, cooking at Fix in Art has taught me many things: how to eat with others, how to accept food made by others, how to receive food without explanation or debt. The power of communal eating as ritual of survival in crisis. It has also taught me about privilege; the privilege of choice, of mobility, of my hunger as a temporary inconvenience rather than a structural condition. That hunger is about more than an empty stomach. We hunger for safety, for knowledge, for home(s), for recognition, we hunger to belong. However, romanticising food as something that “brings us all together” risks erasing the very conditions that determine who has access to food, who produces it, who serves it or who can refuse.
When Fix in Art lost its long-term Thessaloniki home in 2023 they moved to the small fisherman’s village Epanomi. Moving from a city to a village is not just a change of address. It meant leaving behind an audience, a public, a rhythm.
By moving toward self-sufficiency, Fix in Art put a great deal of effort into making sure there would always be a place to put a table down: no longer a given, but something to be worked for and protected. Infrastructure becomes the most visible when you lose it. Finding - and re-building- a new community is something we are still, today, in the middle of doing.
When we founded echoes residency for Fix in Art in 2024, these were some of the many thoughts we had. We wanted to think about a residency as an infrastructure: We wanted to collectively unlearn and relearn and do so from the ground. We wanted a space to listen and create, that we care about. We had gone looking for care in the curatorial, and it was quickly revealed to us that here, care meant maintenance: taking care of each other. One of the ways of doing that has been through food.
We were also, quickly, faced with a clash between the abundance of some resources and the scarcity of others. That clash is where maintenance actually lives: care isn't the warm idea of it, it's the daily, unglamorous work of matching what's overflowing to what's missing. Even without the urgency of a pandemic, it turns out still to be about maintenance. We set out to think about caring, kind, loving ways of curating - and found ourselves, again, back at the same table.
Every residency brings different appetites, allergies, ingredients and skills and every resident, ultimately, creates the sobremesa. I would like our sobremesa to be served at a table where everyone knows they can come without being invited at all. And if I invite you to a table, have I already decided that it’s mine? Or can it become ours?