Lucy Lippard: All Over the Place

Lippard, Lucy. “All Over the Place.” The Lure of the Local: Senses of Place in a Multicentered Society. NY: The New Press, 1997: 4-20.

Each time we enter a new place, we become one of the ingredients of an existing hybridity, which is really what all “local places” consist of. By entering that hybrid, we change it; and in each situation we may play a different role. (Lippard, 6)

The intersections of nature, culture, history, and ideology form the ground on which we stand—our land, our place, the local. The lure of the local is the pull of place that operates on each of us, exposing our politics and our spiritual legacies. (Lippard, 7)

Inherent in the local is the concept of place—a portion of land/town/cityscape seen from the inside, the resonance of a specific location that is known and familiar. Most often place applies to our own “local”—entwined with personal memory, known or unknown histories, marks made in the land that provoke and evoke. Place is latitudinal and longitudinal within the map of a person’s life. It is temporal and spatial, personal and political. A layered location replete with human histories and memories, place has width as well as depth. Its about connections, what surrounds it, what formed it, what happened there, what will happen there. (Lippard, 7)

For many, displacement is the factor that defines a colonized or expropriated place. And even if we can locate ourselves, we haven’t necessarily examined our place in, or our actual relationship to, that place. Yet our personal relationships to history and place form us, as individuals and groups, and in reciprocal ways we form them. Land, history, and culture meet in a multicentered society that values place but cannot be limited to one view. (Lippard, 9)

I use space here as a physical, sometimes experiential, component. If space is where culture is lived, then place is the result of their union. (Lippard, 10)