“Stories about places are makeshift things. They are composed of the world’s debris…Within the structured space of the text, they thus produce anti-texts, effects of dissimulation and escape, possibilities of moving into other landscapes…The dispersion of stories points to the dispersion of the memorable as well. And in fact memory is a sort of anti-museum: it is not localizable. Fragments of it come out in legends.” – Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday life

Welcome to There Is No There, a Miami-based art site that takes much of its content from different locations. The relationship between global and local will frequently be examined on this site, so I’m not eager to offer any premature generalizations. However, some guidelines: being Miami-based and being Miami-centric are two separate things; this site aspires to the former. Only a portion of the site is explicitly about the city. In keeping with South Florida’s splintered flux of people and ideas via immigration and decentralization, the site will mediate international culture through the Miami experience (whatever that turns out to be) and then go from there. The purpose of this website is to provide exposure and contextualization for Miami’s art scene, it is also to interrogate its existing cultural conditions.This is done by providing an exhibition space for primary documents. Artists and writers have been asked to contribute to an expanding dialogue that takes Miami as a point of departure and will surely persist into stranger territories.

For instance, what is one to make of the local preoccupation with the found object? How should Miami be located globally? The movement of language and culture vastly complicate matters, as does the freeflow of global capital. Does Miami owe more to New York, Havana, or a Russian oil field? As such, the first installment of TINT deals with place.

For the inaugural installment, Andy Coolquitt, an Austin-based sculptor and installation artist, shares an excerpt from Crack Sites, an ever-expanding archive in which he documents the liminal and litter-strewn corners of the declining American metropolis. Robert van der Hilst, a Dutch photographer based in Shanghai, exhibits his series, Les Interiors Cubains, a group of photographs taken of Cubans between 1986 and 2001. Conceptualizing the process of human migration, writer Jacob Dreyer contributes Four Theses on Chinese Population. Sewon Chung and Taurin Barerra, two American artists based in Kunming, China, further this investigation of the east.

Additionally, There Is No There has several other sections. Search History allows a guest curator to share their own private internet. For the first issue, MOCA North Miami Curator Ruba Katrib shares some of her favorite websites. Deco(de) exists exclusively to parse Miami’s cultural heritage. There is also a blog.