Do I need territory?

Each year Artspace Aotearoa sets one question which our exhibitions and events orbit in the company of artists and audiences. Across the year, we explore what this question offers us and what artworks and their authors can weave together. In 2024, we ask, "do I need territory?"

These annual questions are multifaceted invitations to consider the world in which we live. They are poetic, philosophical, and open yet, never untethered from material reality and its urgencies. Since drafting this question in early 2023 it has developed sharpened bearing as instances of material urgency have forced it into focus at an intensifying rate. These urgencies have included, but are not limited to: the irreparable harm to human dignity unfolding in occupied Gaza and the threats made to Te Tiriti o Waitangi in Aotearoa. Like all necessary questions, “do I need territory?” encompasses the full breadth of human experience: conflict to optimism, fragility to strength. Like all necessary questions, it also insists that we account for the limits many experience in daily life as much as it opens up possibilities to reconsider the codes through which we organise our lives.

History shows us that commitment to critique prevalent modes of relating is unflinching. It also shows us a dogged insistence on wielding power at the cost of the other can push resources to their absolute limit. Late capitalism suggests much of human value is experienced at the edge of things in the edges: the point where one body ends and another begins, where community space finishes and private domain starts, where monetised time clocks off and our 'free time' takes hold.

The impulse to compartmentalise these not necessarily distinct zones has been an efficient tool for the entrenchment of hierarchy through nation states, public service entities, and even families. This delineation process may be presented as serving a particular cause, where an annotated boundary is required for protection's sake, however there are equally instances where this act results in experiences of radical dehumanisation. Boundaries, borders, and cuts are concepts enacted to extract a quantifiable value by separating said value from the other. However, scholar and activist Ruth Wilson Gilmore encourages us to consider that these same sites are also where relationships begin, where transformation becomes possible.

What shape would the world take if we would go towards difference? Perhaps the sister to what we ask this year is the question, “where do we find solidarity?" When solidarity is understood to be a form of abundance that ensures dignity and security for all, the question of its location becomes essential. What would it take to feel not only part of a community but also full as an individual, a boundless participant? Would it take access to a critical and lively art world? Would it take access to one's whakapapa, language, and stories? Would it take the ability to describe your terms of engagement? If freedom emerges by our commitment to it again and again it must take many forms.

In 2024’s programme each participating artist and their work contribute to considering the annual question in a dynamic way. Rather than producing a clear answer we seek to describe a whole. This whole insists that yes, opening the door to fundamental questions is to be in conversation with the poetic, the philosophical, and material realities.

Ruth Buchanan, January 2024