Aesthetics of Democracy

Andrea Phillips will expose how most formations of public space – political, cultural, institutional – can be critiqued for the way in which they impose types of action upon their subject. The word democracy, we must remember, implies not only intentions of freedom through open discourse, but also the basic inequalities any democratic process invariably starts from. Accordingly, conceptions of public space are on the one hand based on the democratic idea of free movement and free speech, and on the other, hinged upon the falsification or suppression of these very values.

This talk will focus on the important relationship between public space and democracy, and how it both is articulated by how we behave in the urban environment, and conditions how we move and act within it. The question is weather socially-engaged cultural practices are able to support the formation of public space, and what the nature of such an engagement might be.