The Morning Desk
Essays, conversations and field notes from the bureau — on the artists, exhibitions and ideas we keep returning to.
Opening the desk…
Parallel Worlds
We all come from somewhere.
In the late 20th and early 21st centuries, we used the term “post” to describe a world that felt like an aftermath: postmodern, postcolonial, post-truth. The term points to a break, but only gently, keeping the past as the relational context through which the present is understood. By attaching modernity, colonialism, or truth to a “post” condition, these frameworks are not fully left behind. They remain the primary reference points for our current condition. This deictic language, defining the present by pointing back to what came before, no longer suits our time. We are inhabiting a moment where the structures that once defined the world no longer carry the same authority.
In preparing for this exhibition, I found myself tripping over my own assumptions. I approach the work from the perspective of an American curator at a time when the world order I inherited no longer feels secure. I tell myself that this shift may lead to a better, more equitable, and multipolar world. Still, I catch myself circling around fear, surely emerging from my bias… What does it mean to live in a world where “the West” no longer occupies the position of authority?
Alone, Together / Locals, Everywhere
In 2023, the exhibition title of the Venice Biennial seemed to perfectly encompass our socio political environment: Foreigners Everywhere.
It was elegant, political, and true: a pejorative transformed into a rallying cry from a fractured global present.
Like Just Do It, it was also symptomatic in its power to compel, to cultivate likes and shares.
It could have been the tagline for a drop on Instagram, Twitter, or TikTok Shop… catching our short attention span in a world of hyper-connectivity, click-commerce and hyper-isolation. Here we are foreign in our own homes (are they even ours any more?) and are strangers on infinite scroll… flooded with images of disposable elsewheres and others, alien even to ourselves.
l’enfer, c’est les autres
Nobody wants this anymore. We have reached a critical mass of despair with the false promise of mass “reach” and hyper-connectivity.
Locals Everywhere is not a denial of this reality.
It is a response to this despair, and a proposal for both an exit and a path forward…
Away from our self-imposed terms of estrangement.
To be local is not a matter of origin.
It’s a matter of attention,
Of intention,
Of how we choose to show up.
To be local is to participate, to be in relation, to stay proximate, whether digitally or physically, through care and affinity, rather than claim.
Locals Everywhere names an interior exodus.
A movement away from the algorithmic public square, away from mass dissemination as goal, and toward something quieter, more intimate. To crave and respect limits. To see and integrate with technology as an extension of intimacy, instead of “using” “it” as a tool for hacking our attention span.
A distributed intimacy.
A post-geographic kinship.
A refusal to define ourselves by displacement, and an invitation to begin again through presence and connection.
This is not utopia. It is something more fragile, and more possible.
A politics of coherence.
A small, glowing warmth.
A shared finitude.
To live here, on this fifth shore, is to relinquish mastery in favor of mutuality. It is to recognize the instability and porousness of identity, not as crisis, but as condition.
To speak with voices that are not ours alone.
Here, authorship dissolves into relation.
Voice becomes encounter.
Intimacy is not proximity… but coherence.
We are alone, together.
We are local, everywhere.
We are not finished.