Nonsite Intro

NONSITE COLLECTIVE: An Introduction

Nonsite is an emerging collective of artists, poets, activists, archivists, independent scholars and non-traditional learners whose aim is to bring a range of communities into contact and conversation across disciplines, nourishing new forms of artistic collaboration, self-organized pedagogy, and public participation. While a majority of the collective's active participants are in the San Francisco Bay Area, Nonsite also maintains active affiliation with groups and individuals in New York City, Montréal, Cincinnati, and Rochester, and is open to further alliances / mutual supports with organizations elsewhere.

The project’s organizational framework includes exhibitions, publications, performances, colloquia, readings, archives, study groups, and hybrid events, all of which will act as points of leverage for ongoing cultural engagement and social action. This plural form of organization responds to a comparative lack of sustained community response to, and use of, localized aesthetic production. To remedy this gap, Nonsite works across often hardened cultural boundaries—between disciplines and communities—to nourish self-organized engagement around art, understood as a social practice. Nonsite proposes a community-based model for engaging with culture, whereby creative works and their effects are not isolated and discrete but are rather linked up, elaborated on, and archived within a web of community responses and reuses. In this model, collectively proposed “curricula” become series of art and research events and an ever-evolving archive becomes the “object.”

While documenting the collective’s own activity and organizing a usable record of the project’s history, the archive also functions as a reservoir of materials for future use, and the location of further production, as well as the scene for community-building, discussion and critique. Integral to the work of growing new communities and audiences will be an open invitation to participate in this self-archiving practice. In addition to its online archive, the collective is already in the process of organizing several curricula, which include an array of activities and events.

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Other Resources

Nonsite grant proposal, July 2007: This proposal for Southern Exposure's Alternative Exposure grants program, was written by Rob Halpern with input from other collective members. It served as the basis for this wiki page.