Charlotte Østergaard is an artist researcher whose practice is situated in the intersection of crafting, co-creation, and the aesthetics and ethics of hosting. Her doctoral thesis Crafting Material Bodies investigated how material practices become modes of listenings and shared authorship within artistic and social contexts. Through this practice-led inquiry, she explored relational potential of materials, attending to how bodies and materials co-craft and co-compose meaning in spaces of co-creation.

At the core of Ostergaard's research is commitment to listenings as a material and methodological gestures – a form of attunement to others, to difference, and to the more-than-human agencies embedded in crafting processes. She frames hosting as a mode of becoming-with: an ethical and political stance that invites openness, plurality, and the making of hospitable conditions for difference to co-exist and co-emerge. Østergaard's research challenges dominant, often extractive, logics of production, instead proposing lydhøre and rummelige fællesskaber –listening and spacious communities– where the multiplicity of voices, materials, and temporalities are not only allowed but nurtured.

Through embodied and situated making, Østergaard examines how crafting becomes a form of thinking – a way to navigate, respond to, and reshape relations. Her research unfolds in dialogue with co-creative practices, where authorship is shared and material agency recognized. In these contexts, crafting is not merely a technique or skill, but a form of dialogue, negotiation, and care.

By engaging with polyphony, vulnerability, and the politics of presence, Østergaard's work contributes to current discussions in artistic research, listening and crafting theories, and performative practices. She asks: What does it mean to listen –truly listen– through materials. How can we host the unknown, the ambiguous, and the multiple. And how might co-creation be reimagined not as consensus, but as a practice of staying with difference.