Out of Place
Invited Lecture Prague Quadrennial
2015

Out-of-Place tracks appear, lines appear, edges appear, borders appear, boundaries appear. We encounter place whether staged, politicalized, socialized or individualized. Place suggests location, situates and determines various occupations of ground, behaviour, gesture, movement and language. Anywhere can be a place but not anyplace is anyone’s. To be part of a place is at the decrement to be part of another place. We can feel out-of-place, be all over the place and be put in our place. On the other side–of place–we can assume that if nothing takes place, then there is no place – at all.

Drawing on the writings about place by Giambattista Vico, Leon Battista Alberti and contemporary thinkers such as Susan Sontag, Edward Casey and Eyal Weizman along with artists Francis Alÿs, Santiago Sierra and Claire Denis, the talk will explore how out-of-place; resistance, conformity, oppression and separation emerge. Alberti in his ten volume On The Art of Building, describes how the sixteenth century practice by men urinating on the outside walls of buildings led to the corruption of these walls and, inevitably, the places they formed. Out-of-place we might consider what to put in-place to incite change, counter radicalism, seek and endure revolution and realize our ideals.