Sarah Kelleher / Rachel Warriner

Beginning …
Zero: the point on the scale which marks the switch from positive to negative. A point from where progress can be charted. A point of objectivity and assessment, of potential, a vantage point. We can go anywhere from here. Where do we go?

Restarting …
In time. What happens when we stop thinking forward? When there is a pause?
We step over the threshold into an open space. The Land of Zero is a place of virtual dimensions, a staging ground. A space for novelty, for resistance and space to re-imagine the past. A place to take stock.

Start again …
Engaging with this moment of suspension, we wonder about what we form in this formlessness. Zero isn’t the same as nothing, it’s a reset, a return, a restart: a proliferation rather than a vacuum. Is this a rupture? A space? What we can do with the new? What we can make in a space designed for potential? Is it hopeful? Challenging? Disruptive? The terrain is fluid and ever changing – how then do we ground ourselves? What do we bring with us that is useful? What do we need to invent? What can we leave behind?

And again …
Our intervention is one that jumps into the Land of Zero, but questions where we are, what we’re doing by trying to start again, to have a space free from the past. The Shakers sought out a Land of Zero, somewhere to start from scratch … but there were people there, there were things. Zero was a fiction, only workable through erasure. We wonder about traces, about palimpsest. We wonder about how we forge a new way, how space can be made for this radical school, how we escape the confines of the existing one.

Once more …
Ezra Pound said ‘Make it new’, but what do we do after a century of newness? Can we keep resetting to zero? Where do we head to start again?