Background Creating textiles for utilitarian purposes has for millennia been the main motivation for hand weaving. Why should we uphold the practice today when textiles can be woven both faster and more cheaply industrially? In conversations I have led since 2013 with craftspeople in Denmark, Japan, Sweden, Finland and Mexico, the productive achievement in craft, the usable product, features as only one in a range of diverse motivations for weavers/makers. Craft connects work (material, time and product), people (suppliers, family, co-workers and neighbours) and space (the living and built environment), and is enabled by the movements of the craftsperson’s body, intellect and soul. The recurring appearance of themes like individual and communal identity, tacit and embodied knowledge, nuanced and instinctive bodily sensitivity, and social cohesion and development in these exchanges are not a surprise, yet pose a difficult question: in what way can these potentials be used in our digital-industrial times. The first edition of the Export/import workshop (held at 21st Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, Japan in 2017) attempted to translate into a direct physical experience the values that craft is given by its practitioners around the globe: the potential meaning of craft for us as humans in different parts of our globalized society. In 2019 I had the opportunity to develop a further edition of the Export/Import installation as part of the exhibition Japan Retur at A. Petersen Gallery in Copenhagen. Go visiting, having visits I decided to use this occasion to work more deliberately with the act of “having visits” as a specific method of inquiry. I have come to think of “having visits” as a method of inquiry in participatory craft and design research after reading professor Donna Haraway´s book Staying with the Trouble (Haraway 2016). In the chapter “A Curious Practice” (126-133), Haraway presents German philosopher Hannah Arendt’s thoughts on “go visiting” and builds on them using the fieldwork of Belgian philosopher Vinciane Despret. In Haraway´s interpretation, “visiting” for a researcher means going out into the world being curious and engaging with what one meets, not looking for specific answers or solutions but allowing for what will happen in encounters to influence the research path. Haraway here works with the posture of being “response-able” (130). The visit is a dynamic between the researcher and who and what is encountered. Mistakes and misunderstandings are likely to happen when engaging with others, but, says Haraway, this is exactly where the yet-unknown is likely to be found: “Visiting is a subject- and object-making dance, and the choreographer is a trickster.” (127) As a designer creating weaving spaces for engagement and participation, my process consists not only in visiting different contexts. It is an essential part of my practice to receive visitors – to have visits – in the spaces that I set up. In the participatory projects I have created in the past seven years, my experience has been that having visits and, thus, being the host can be an equally stimulating and thought-provoking process as venturing to go visiting. Having visits at gallery A. Petersen Two workshops at A. Petersen departed from how I had worked previously. For the first time I had invited a group of experienced Danish weavers and a group of Nordic weaving educators to spend time weaving and conversing in a weaving space I had set up, in order to have a more informed conversation about what weaving meant for them and for their students. The conversations were recorded, and one of the sessions documented through photography. What was particularly interesting for me in this first attempt to work more deliberately with “having visits” as a method of inquiry was to observe how the physical movement affected the conversation? Time with the loom allowed each of the weavers to step in and out of the conversation as they pleased and it allowed for elaborations between two or three people instead of the whole group. The interaction with the materials and looms evoked new and different considerations about the different topics than sitting around a table. I also believe that the physical movement and interaction with material, compared with concentrated conversation of an interview, made it possible to spend five active hours together without being exhausted. While there is still much to explore and refine in the use of “having visits” as a method of inquiry, this first attempt confirmed that there is potential. In the coming phase of the PhD project I will work with how to consider and develop the set-up up my spaces in ways that physically evokes considerations in relation to my inquiry, when having visits.