This house is not a home: Producing encounter-based collective formats in the time of COVID-19

In the summer of 2020, the a-disciplinary platform K moved into the exhibition space of Lothringer 13 Halle in Munich. The event This House Is Not a Home that K organized there functioned both as an exhibition space for gallery visitors and also as a social format for meeting and sharing. Over the course of the intervention, more than 50 participants came together to inhabit the space, share their skills in art and other disciplines, eat together, and use the infrastructure. The space was furnished with artistic contributions that represented individual participants and were also functional. In this practice-based, autoethnographic essay, three organizers reflect on how the event was planned and unfolded in the light of the institutional regulations and demands that arose due to the COVID-19 pandemic. They discuss the dynamics of social, nonrepresentational formats in art institutions and processes for negotiating them.