OnTopo: Designing Containers for the Sacred

Through my studio, Common Space, I have become increasingly interested in something that many cultural institutions still underestimate: the gathering itself as a form of infrastructure. Not the event as content. Not the opening as a networking obligation with warm white wine and strategic eye contact. I mean the gathering as an actual cultural technology, a structure that produces relationships, language, trust, and possibility before any object, exhibition, or formal organization fully exists.

This interest did not begin in an institutional setting. It emerged out of experimental music, dance culture, and a long-standing fascination with temporary environments. Growing up with the influence of Detroit techno and later moving through creative circles in New York, I saw how spaces not originally intended for culture could become potent cultural containers. Warehouses, camps, studios, borrowed buildings, makeshift rooms in the countryside. These spaces mattered not because they were polished, but because they permitted a different arrangement of attention. People behaved differently in them. They listened differently. They met across categories that more formal institutions often keep separate.

That lesson stayed with me. Long before OnTopo had a name, I was already trying to understand how temporary gatherings could function as a platform for artistic and social experimentation. One of the clearest early expressions of that impulse was The Last Weekend, a project I organized with a group of friends at an adult summer camp in upstate New York called Camp Lakota. It unfolded over several days and brought together workshops, performances, artist-led projects, DIY activities, and the low-grade but meaningful chaos that occurs when creative people are given time, place, and enough latitude to surprise one another.

What interested me about that project was not only the content of any single performance or workshop. It was the ecology. A camp created a very particular social condition. People woke up together, wandered between activities, encountered each other out of sequence, and had enough time for things to accumulate. That temporal dimension matters. So much contemporary cultural life is organized around acceleration: quick openings, compressed fairs, panels that pretend conversation can be accomplished in forty-five minutes under fluorescent duress. The Last Weekend offered a different rhythm. It allowed sociality and experimentation to become part of the work rather than merely the frame around it.

In retrospect, I think it was one of the earlier artist-led retreat formats of its kind in that context. Similar gatherings would later proliferate, some better funded and better documented, which is usually how history works. But the point is not priority. The point is that those weekends revealed how much could happen when people were given a designed environment that was neither fully institutional nor purely recreational. Friendships formed. Collaborations emerged. Bonds were established that later moved into other parts of New York's creative ecosystem. There is a quiet but real social history embedded in these gatherings, one that rarely gets archived properly because institutions tend to privilege the visible output over the relational substrate that made the output possible.

OnTopo emerged after that as a scaled-down offshoot, something more intimate and more focused. If The Last Weekend was expansive, OnTopo became more concentrated. It retained the interest in gathering as a medium, but with an increased emphasis on attention, context, and the possibility that art, spirituality, performance, and social exchange might coexist in the same container without being forced into a single institutional language.

Part of what drove that shift was my sense that many important experiences in culture were occurring outside the official architecture of culture. This is not an anti-institutional point. Institutions remain important, even when they behave predictably. But they are not the only sites where meaningful cultural organization occurs. Sometimes the more interesting question is what kinds of environments allow people to encounter one another differently, to test forms of participation that would feel overly fragile or overly strange inside a museum, gallery, or conference setting.

One of the earlier versions of this thinking surfaced in Tulum around 2015 and 2016, where a series of OnTopo-related activities took place in connection with Hartwood and a broader framework that included dinners, movement, listening, and artist-led projects. Looking back, I can also say with more maturity than I had at the time that there were limitations to that early work. It operated with a kind of naïveté that was not uncommon among creative people of that period, especially those moving through transnational scenes with more enthusiasm than political awareness. We were not working with local Indigenous guides or grounding the project in a sufficiently developed understanding of the place. That matters. It should matter. One of the more useful things about time is that it gives you the chance to revise your own myths before someone else does it for you.

At the same time, I do not think those early experiments were empty. Participants found them meaningful. People who attended often expressed a depth of gratitude that was not about spectacle or status but about the quality of the container itself. New contexts generate new forms of presence. That is still one of the central lessons I carry from OnTopo. When you alter spatial conditions, temporal rhythm, and the relation between participants, you alter what kinds of experiences become possible.

Through my studio, Common Space, I now think of OnTopo less as a single event series and more as a platform logic. It asks: what if gathering itself were treated as a serious design problem? What if one approached the social field with the same rigor often reserved for exhibitions, brand systems, or digital interfaces? How does one compose a sequence of encounters? How does one build conditions for trust without scripting false intimacy? How does one respect the specificity of a place while still inviting experimentation? How does one avoid turning "community" into a sentimental aesthetic product, which is unfortunately one of the more durable habits of the contemporary cultural economy?

These questions have only become more relevant. In a moment when digital platforms mediate so much of our cultural attention, physical gatherings have acquired a renewed significance. Not because they are automatically authentic, which is the sort of lazy binary one should avoid, but because they can produce density in ways that digital environments often cannot. A well-designed gathering creates lateral knowledge. It allows people from different disciplines and social positions to meet outside their expected scripts. It generates future projects without demanding that those projects be visible immediately. It builds the preconditions for culture.

This is especially important if one is interested in creating platforms rather than just events. A platform is not merely a container that holds content. It is a structure that enables repeated participation, interpretation, and evolution. OnTopo, in that sense, has always been a platform in embryonic form. It creates environments where artists can test practices, where relationships can deepen, and where different forms of knowledge can coexist without prematurely hardening into brand language.

There is also, for me, a spiritual dimension to this work, though I use that term carefully. I do not mean spirituality as a market segment, which contemporary culture is unfortunately very good at monetizing. I mean the possibility that certain environments can encourage a heightened quality of attention, a feeling that one's relation to place, to others, and to time has shifted. Some gatherings allow that. Most do not. The difference is not magic. It is design.

If institutions are serious about cultural innovation, they would do well to pay more attention to this layer. The future of culture will not be shaped only by objects, exhibitions, and funding structures, though all of those matter. It will also be shaped by who knows each other, under what conditions they met, what environments allowed their thinking to deepen, and what kinds of gatherings taught them how to imagine together. That is not soft infrastructure. It is infrastructure, full stop.

OnTopo has been one way for me to work at that level. Not perfectly, not finally, but seriously. And seriousness, in cultural life, is often more transformative than polish.