Autumn at Hostačov

We expect around five to ten people to spend a substantial part of the autumn here. They form a continuity group around which shorter visits, working weeks and gatherings can come and go.

This matters. A house with people constantly arriving and leaving can otherwise become socially exhausting. We do not want the culture to reset every Monday. Longer-term residents, together with the house hosts, help give the place memory, rhythm and a sense of an already-existing household that newcomers can enter.

Staying here does not mean joining everything. Longer-term residents are welcome to participate deeply in a gathering, disappear into their work for three days, or move between the two. There will always be dedicated quiet working space away from the main programme.

Across the past year we have hosted both long residencies and short, intensive gatherings, and have learned a fair amount about accommodating different needs for focus, sociability and intensity in the same house. We try to make participation easy at the minimum and potentially very deep if you want to lean in.

We expect to offer reduced contributions for longer stays of 10+ days. Tell us roughly how long you would like to stay in the interest form and we can work out the practicalities with you.

During the week, several rooms will be set up for quiet coworking, alongside private rooms for calls and one room primarily dedicated to the project or community holding that week's focus.

You can work alongside that project, contribute to it, have a conversation with the people involved, or simply continue with your own work.

Around this, there will usually be a few optional offerings during the day: yoga, meditation or other embodied practice; a workshop or intellectual session; a walk; somebody sharing something they have been working on.

Evenings may involve a fire, board games, karaoke, dancing, a film, a conversation that gets unexpectedly serious, or everybody going to bed.

Hostačov is large enough for several rhythms to coexist. There should almost always be somewhere to join the flow and somewhere to disappear from it.

Each gathering will have its own character. Some will be relatively structured; others will leave considerably more space for participants to shape what happens.

Across them, we are aiming for a participatory culture with high agency and relatively little separation between “organisers”, “speakers” and “participants”. Expect conversations, workshops, practices, experiments and formats that do not fit neatly into those categories.

Most gatherings centre on the weekend. Some extend into Monday or Tuesday with looser unconference-style sessions for people who want to remain with the questions for longer.

Longer-term residents do not have to participate in the full gathering. Quiet working space will remain available even when the rest of the house becomes busier.

We will publish more detailed descriptions as each gathering takes shape. The central topics and core contributors are already sufficiently confirmed that we feel confident inviting people into them now.