It is worth thinking of artworks and artistic practices as pointing towards previously nonexistent places, like fate lines guiding us towards territories we would never have reached had we not been shown the way.

This project takes its title from an essay by Lucy R. Lippard, [1] in which she imagined a future in which artistic practices might lead us to a different collective vision of place. Where We’re At. Where We Could Be is an artistic research project and curatorial experiment that aims to rethink the way we connect with our surroundings, context and sense of place. It sees these concepts as spaces with transitory definitions that link together a collection of personal and cultural memories. These spaces need an outside observer to shape interrelated stories together into a meaningful whole, including gender issues and power relationships, altered geographies and economies, and ecology seen as a longed-for home, an idea that survives now only as a memory.

The exhibition uncovers the relationships hidden behind gestures, or buried beneath our ritualised consciousness and systematic repetitions, and calls on us to reimagine the idea of collective ethics. In this ecosystem of gestures, material assemblages give rise to different statements at different times and create a medium for championing a new idea of there understood as a place where things begin.

The works in the show explore these concepts and ask us to imagine an interactive, process-based art which, as Lippard envisaged, might bring us closer to a new social expression of art that would reflect her vision of the future by creating accessible work of any kind that cares about, challenges, involves and consults the audience for or with whom it is made. [2]

Perhaps, as she predicted, any new kind of art practice will have to take place at least partially outside the art world, even though these territories are all the more fraught with peril.