Join us for a fascinating exploration of earth-system processes, where water becomes light, light becomes sound, and sound becomes insight into the tropical forests of Colombia – far from our day-to-day world, but close as Watershed Art & Ecology.
Hours: Saturdays 2pm to 7pm, or by appointment
Location: 1821 S Racine Ave, Chicago
Practices of Place
“We artists don’t create artworks. We invent practices.”
— Silvio Lang
With Practices of Place, Felipe Macia invites us into an evolving field of artistic inquiry where art becomes method, and method becomes a means of re-sensing the world. Rooted in the notion that artists invent practices—not objects—this exhibition proposes a set of sensitive protocols: ways of sensing, shaping, and inhabiting place through experimentation with time, body, material, memory, atmosphere and ecology.
Macia’s work is driven by the belief that artists hold the capacity to reform bodies, norms, and social structures. His projects are not representations of landscape, but invitations to co-create it—through practices that are spatial, climatic, scientific, sonic, somatic, and poetic. These series of research-intensive practices where art becomes a tool for subjective mutation and collective re-imagining—for the artist who transforms his own way of life, and for viewers who are pulled into a process of becoming. Communing with Silvio Lang’s invitation, this exhibition proposes a field of experimental geography—where time, memory, landscape, and climate are not just subjects of inquiry but active collaborators in the work.
The works in Practices of Place enact a return of embodied presences, a political ecology of things, and a regenerative pragmatics of the interweave—folding the political, pedagogical, and artistic into living material inquiry. Across all these works, Practices of Place makes a powerful claim: that art is not separate from the systems that sustain life—it is embedded in them, responsive to them, and capable of transforming them.
