Doing Democracy#2

This essay is an attempt to bring to bear upon the now normative concerns of relational or participatory artistic, architectural and curatorial practices a more complex formation of the way in which social participation, that which constitutes democracy-in-name, is achieved through cultural production. As such, I aim to contextualise and question the political implications of the ‘Support Structure’ project by Celine Condorelli and Gavin Wade, and think through its differences and similarities to other forms of contemporary, ‘participatory’ cultural production. Support Structure arises out of, and chooses to critique, a set of imperatives that are at once curatorial and political: it is here that the project both exemplifies and, perhaps, reinvents, a series of contemporary practices that need to be understood through a broader constellation of political (and politicised) aesthetics.