The Shape of the Room: On Language, Power, and the Marginal

While in Aotearoa, Billy Tang gave a lecture on his curatorial practice across three institutions: Magician Space in Beijing, Rockbund Art Museum in Shanghai, and Para Site in Hong Kong. His central provocation framed the talk: can the languages used by institutions — behavioural, procedural, structural — accommodate the marginal, and support the forging of enduring connections?

He didn’t answer the question explicitly. Instead, he spoke through the projects themselves. Drawing on work across the three sites, he unpacked the challenges he encountered and the thinking that led him to try innovative approaches. He walked us through exhibitions and initiatives shaped by disruption, marked by small, deliberate shifts in what a space could hold, who it could centre, and what it could refuse. His emphasis avoided grand statements, focusing instead on responsiveness and a willingness to work differently, especially during unstable times like the global pandemic.

The talk was thoughtful but left me with questions. Not because it lacked value, but because I live in a different institutional context, shaped by different pressures and opportunities. I’m not convinced the structures I encounter even want to accommodate the marginal, let alone build anything enduring with it.

When we ask whether institutional language can accommodate the marginal, we must start by asking what “accommodation” really means, especially here in Aotearoa. Too often it stops at tolerance and inclusion, without building the structures needed for support or redistribution of labour. A careful invitation where the shape of the room never changes, but someone gestures vaguely at an empty seat and says, “Come in, we made space.” Accommodation, in this context, is not a neutral offer but a managed condition, shaped by an unspoken calculus that determines how much difference can be held without forcing structural change.

Who does that space belong to?

Who sets the terms of entry, and what’s unsaid about how you’re meant to behave once you’re there? These questions land differently when you are inside the institution, where critique often has to move tactically, shaped as much by what can be said as by what cannot.

Procedural language records outcomes while determining which actions are recognised as valid in the first place. Structural language belies the underlying systems it claims to describe, revealing value hierarchies quietly attached to spreadsheets. Behavioural language comes preloaded with the expectation to be grateful. To not make too much noise. To speak on behalf of something, but not too often about yourself.

I’ve watched institutions build projects about the marginal while expecting those of us at the edge to carry the emotional labour, the cultural translation, the risk. “Collaboration” becomes optics, while power stubbornly stays put. The language is inclusive until you push against it. When you do so, it often doesn’t land cleanly and the inconvenient get pushed to the side.

When I think about whether these structures can support enduring connection, I think not unless we change the shape of the room, not just who gets invited into it.

And so what do we do?

We seek out structures that fit. We move toward kaupapa-based spaces that don’t just permit the marginal but are formed by it. Or we get to building, choosing movement over inertia.

Paemanu refuses thematic framing, building instead from whakapapa as logic. Mata Aho’s collective practice moves at the speed of trust, not funding cycles. At places like Enjoy, kaupapa Māori and kaupapa Moana frameworks reshape not just programming but governance and values. Gatherings by Toi Māori Aotearoa locate infrastructure in kōrero, shared breath, and the names that carry us. Artist-run spaces reject the treadmill entirely, building for care, access, and autonomy rather than exposure.

These spaces accommodate difference. They ask different questions. They hold different timelines. They often operate on extraordinarily little yet hold a clarity that’s hard to find elsewhere.

But what happens when even those spaces stop fitting?

Because they do. The frustrating part here is that it doesn’t come from failure, but typically from success, which then causes pressure, scarcity, and volume issues. The more people who recognise something true in them, the more stretched thin they become. Suddenly they have to say no, while slowly morphing into institutions themselves. They then face the same dilemma: how to scale care without turning it into policy, how to hold integrity without gatekeeping, how to honour the marginal when there’s not enough room for everyone.

We can often find ourselves inside a space built “for us,” while still butting against what could be determined as a bad fit, despite not knowing what would make it so. So then we need to sit with it long enough to notice what the discomfort is telling us. Is it invisibility? Grief? Ego? Exhaustion? Have we outgrown something, or were we never a fit to begin with?

Only then can we stop expecting any one space to hold everything. We recognise that even the best spaces are partial, specific, limited by the capacity of the people who hold them. Then we build parallel. Tangential. Small and stubborn. A practice, a ritual, a refusal. We stop orbiting the centre and start imagining life off its axis.

There are moments when the work is not to advance or resolve, but to hold a kaupapa in place until its shape becomes clear.

And sometimes that means we go quiet, until we can carry the load again.

Fitting isn’t always the goal. Sometimes the goal is just to keep going. Without distortion or trimming your edges to slide into someone else’s framework. Keep going, even when it’s not clear where you’re going to.

But really, let’s talk about that language.

Behavioural. Procedural. Structural. The scaffolding of the institution. The unseen code that tells you how to move, how to speak, how to belong. It doesn’t announce itself, you’ll instead find it in the wording of a form, the pace of a meeting, the hierarchy of an email thread. Who gets cc’d. Who chairs. Who apologises for speaking too long. Writing from within means recognising that critique is never outside the room it addresses; it is shaped, constrained, and negotiated in real time.

You learn to navigate language like a second skin, becoming fluent through a necessity that borders on defensive mechanism. Pauses, tones, the institutional yes, or a maybe that obviously means no. You continuously question how much of yourself to reveal. How to sound like someone they already trust.

This language is invisible to the fluent. But for those of us outside it, fluency comes at a cost. You can learn it, sure. But you might lose something: a rhythm, a truth, a way of speaking that doesn’t flatten.

And language shapes outcomes. It’s not just about getting a seat at the table. It’s about whether your way of thinking can survive in the room. Whether your metaphors make sense to funders. Whether your urgency matches the calendar. Whether your silences get misread as disengagement. Whether your anger is mistaken for unprofessionalism.

When institutional languages don’t shift, they don’t just exclude people, they exclude possibilities. Futures. Ways of knowing. Ways of working that don’t follow a proven template.

So yes, we can learn to speak them. But we can also choose not to. We can speak in ways that call something else into being. Even if the room goes quiet. Even if the form gets sent back. Again.

Some of us aren’t here to speak the right way. We’re here to speak honestly. To say the thing that needs saying, even when the structure doesn’t yet know how to hear it.

That is where Billy’s question still lingers. Not in the answer he left unspecified, but in the ways we keep testing the languages we are offered, bending them, breaking them, or refusing them altogether to see what else might endure.

Hayley Walmsley (Ngāti Kawau, Ngāti Tautahi, Ngāpuhi, Ngāti Porou) is an artist, writer, and curator based in Ōtautahi. She makes work about art, systems, and the sneaky ways meaning gets made, and sometimes missed. She writes No Neutral Spaces because she’s too grumpy to let things slide, and too soft to throw the first punch.