Curatorial Rationale

Zones everywhere!

My first awareness of the word “zone” began when I read about London.

London’s public transport runs on a zoning system—

Zone 1 marks the heart of the city,

and from there, the numbered rings spread outward,

Zone 2 to Zone 9,

each boundary quietly calculating the cost of movement.

But “zones” are more than lines on a map.

Each area holds a different rhythm—

streets shift in tone, neighbourhoods breathe with different cadences.

To live in another zone is to live in another London.

In a broader sense, we all come from zones—

geographic belts traced by latitude,

some of us from corners of Britain,

others from distant regions across the globe,

now converging in this city like migratory constellations.

Shifts in space remake the way we see:

faces, customs, weather—all become unfamiliar,

then slowly, blissfully, painfully, our own.

And in spaces that are set apart,

in the axis between East and West, South and North, even female and male,

zones become a metaphorical sign more than geography.

They speak in the language of power, of race, of gender,

of histories not written on maps,

but felt in the body, and carried in the soul.

Here, I seek to magnify our embodied and differentiated perceptions of “zone”

through the fluid state of the in-between—

a state that resists fixity, blurs the spatialisation of power.

Discuss in between as a model of thought—

a fissure where Michel Foucault’s heterotopia might be stirred into being,

where Giorgio Agamben’s state of exception flickers at the edge of recognition,

where queerness is invoked and Marleen S. Barr’s feminist zones rise.

​What’s more? You’re invited to explore and discuss together.

London serves as a point of departure—

a site for minor, tactical interventions,

for a kind of guerrilla spatial practice:

concrete, subtle, provisional.

Through it, an open exchange of thought unfolds—

not as resolution, but as encounter.

Not as mastery, but as movement.

Let’s dwell in (un)defining, becoming and togetherness.​​​​

by Nicole Zihua Zhang, written on June 6, 2025, at home in King’s Cross, London.