Meeting Grounds: On Locality, Community, Connection & Care

Meeting Grounds is an artistic project that seeks to explore the formation of community and our changing perceptions towards publicness through the medium of public space. The project grew in resonance as global phenomena including the pandemic and divisive cultural politics increasingly determined our ability to access certain spaces, and urged us to rethink our relationships to space, place and community; alongside the values we assign to each.

The Meeting Grounds programme of online, participatory events that took place from March to June 2020, at the height of the first wave of the pandemic, sought to examine this limited access, whilst simultaneously exploring the new spaces of community we have produced in response. This resulting publication features the work of 35 selected artists, researchers, designers and writers who took part in the programme. The Meeting Grounds publication therefore acts as a continuation of the ideas and conversations exchanged during this time period as well as an exploration into the social, political and cultural changes that have occurred since the beginning of 2020. In doing so, it hopes to unravel our evolving relationships with space and place, the effects these changes have had on our bodily behaviours, habitual practices and movements and the ways in which we recognise, form and maintain locality, community, connection and care.