I was invited by Konstepidemin, through Jill Lindström and Anna Carlson to exhibit an artwork during the performance festival called ‘13Festivalen’ in January 2015. Recently, I’ve been examining practices of hospitality involving migration and inquiring different politics carried out by governments both locally and nationally. One of them is called ‘Refugee guide’. Basically, the idea is that one (a Swede or someone considering him/herself Swedish) would voluntarily meet a migrant (newly arrived refugees or immigrants), both willing to start a friendship with each other at their own leisure time. You register yourself or your family, stating your hobbies and interests and a handler will find a match for you. They match me up with an artist, a painter who has been living in Sweden for 6 years called Ali Alkurdi Murad. After a few encounters with Ali, talking about our different views about art and dwelling with this situation of being a refugee guide or being in the program, I decided to invite him to collaborate, producing a new artwork with me for the performance festival regarding our new context. To present his practice to the slightly homogeneous audience of the festival and to the artists with studio practices in the area was one of the main concepts within the work. Parallel to this thought, we’ve been discussing on what could be a compromise between (and for) us, curiously dwelling on the ethical eggshells established in the program: to break up this social friendship one would have to call the handler (social worker) then long out of the picture after our first meeting; once we’d endure six months of partnership, we’d be both granted a notorious certificate praising the participation in the program, to name a few. As a consequence to the fore-mentioned, I asked Ali to paint a landscape that could strongly imply Swedishness for him. He decided to paint one of Gothenburg’s main postcards, the ship called Götheborg, travelling lonely into the sea. The depicted ship is a sailing replica of an 18th-century Swedish East Indiaman, considered the world’s largest wooden sailing vessel. We would later use his 190 x 150 cm painting as a backdrop for the performance in the gallery. The performance entailed Ali and I sitting on chairs and looking at each other in front of his painting. Once one gives up looking, the other would speak, asking then to continue, to try it again; at times in Arabic, at times in Swedish. After a long endured period with the looking and the short dialogue for new attempts, Ali looks once more and with a handshake he affirms ‘we continue’ (spoken in Swedish), followed by us gazing at his painting, ending the performance. The artwork does not seek to invalidate the social program but to re-think similar hospitality practices and inquires. Should there be a guide to help newcomers, once they know to their own extent what Swedishness could be? How can the guidance whitin this duality be equally divided? Can the guide benefit from being the guest (read ‘the Other’) at times? How should local, national governments or entities further develop and re-consider such program considering their position not only as matchmaker but also as matchbreaker, and what does that envelop regarding individual compromises and aspirations. And finally, when would it be OK to conclude such curious friendship formed in such fashion? These inquires were sustained and challenged throughout the conception of artwork and its execution and were left still to be further explored in the development of my artistic and research practice.