This Was Always a Place

Marité & Joe Robinson Strolling Gallery I
September 19, 2025–January 18, 2026

The Marité & Joe Robinson Strolling Gallery I features This Was Always a Place, a solo exhibition by Andrew Harrison. Through archives, maps, and embodied movement, Harrison explores altered geographies—dwelling between rupture and repair—and argues for memory, myth, and imagination as essential tools for reshaping the world.

Place can be an unexpectedly complex concept. Places usually include people and an environment along with the culture and social structures they shape. Inhabitants actively create and refine the geographies they experience through various social, political, and material processes. Such placemaking, however, inevitably generates the power dynamics that determine who has rights to a place or how a place is positioned in our personal memories and collective histories.

Multidisciplinary artist Andrew Harrison turns to archive exploration, remapping, performance, and speculation as ways to navigate instances of placemaking. Harrison challenges dominant narratives, uncovers obscured ones, and creates speculative spaces of return and possibility. His works exist in the space between rupture and repair, emphasizing that memory, myth, and imagination are essential tools for reshaping the world.

This exhibition brings together three of Harrison’s series dedicated to navigating resistance, belonging, and the shaping of the past, present, and future. In looking through the lens of the land, Harrison questions how we might reconcile fractured histories and how we might remake the maps—literal and symbolic—that shape understanding.