CoForum | Open Form

CoForum

As people come together, so the walls come down. The CoForum and ‘E Pluribus Unum’ are projects that specifically engage with deliberative processes and plurality, through the crafted, non-discriminatory structure.

Marginal, financially poor and temporary in nature, deliberative processes and civic assemblies’ often default to occupy underutilised, available and ‘neutral’ spaces. There is a natural suspicion of symbolism or monument. In more radical circles, spatial transformation as a result of dynamic action may be celebrated as challenging status quo, whilst the ritual act is seen as exclusive, static and gestural. However, the generic space itself is not neutral. It is often borrowed space, immune to impact. Eroding agency. Consequently, deliberations are not spatially celebrated and leave no physical trace.
Compared to the powerful aesthetic symbols and rituals employed by traditional forms of governance, the lack of form or symbolic language employed by alternative processes is self-defeating. At best, processes become materially invisible, at worst they become spatially restrictive.

Deliberative alternatives require spatial identity.

The challenge is to deliver coherence of meaningful identity, deliver symbolic power, allow for open forms of movement and arrangement. CoForum furthers an ongoing project to provide identity for spaces of deliberation and facility for deliberative pluralism. The project aims to be replicable, creating an international network of forums for deliberative pluralism.

The chair is a wall, a door and a window. One chair is a piece of furniture, 100 chairs are an expression of civic action. The chairs create a space, augmented through sound and narrative, exploring our relationship to the public realm, and to each other. ‘ The essence of equality is in fact not so much to unify as to declassify, to undo the supposed naturalness of orders and replace it’, (Jacques Rancieres).
It is within the nature of the object, pavilion, space, that it transcends traditional forms and carries within it the ambiguity of future potentials.

De-Sign: to avert the use of signs; to erase the creator’s signature; to embrace ambiguity. The individual chair component is developed locally. The deliberative realm is one of response, rather than robust anonymity.

Political form is aesthetic in nature, so too are political struggles. Politics is related to the sensible, as in tangible (Jaques Rancieres). It’s about who we can hear, who we can see, who we will allow into our space, or who gets to occupy space and how. These are fundamental sensory things. The image of citizen has to change. A politics in terms of sensory realities, linked to praxis, icono-praxis, sensory praxis. How you see and feel and make sense of the world. This will not evolve due to a new law or a new monument, it has to be a host of new monuments, a new hegemonic order and a new regime of the senses of the body (Kagri Jain).

The folding chair is the element that navigates the relation between utility and identity. Multiplication of the chair becomes the identity of the whole, whilst also being the element of occupation and of transformation.

To achieve agreement in opinions, we are faced with the implausibility of first achieving agreement on the language used. Chantal Mouffe proposes that effective deliberative processes are ultimately an expression of power through language. Instead of enabling political pluralism, deliberative democracy, by implicating a (language-first) consensus, precludes it. Agonistic Pluralism, is often cited by critics of all forms of deliberative democracy, as a practice within itself and not a phase to be overcome through deliberation.

In the facilitation of both agnostic pluralism and deliberative processes the importance of moving beyond narrow forms of communication is evident. I.e. allowing a plurality of expression to be corporally and spatially. In an attempt not to reduce expression to a ‘reason-only’ hegemony, the importance of form becomes crystallised. We can identify the importance of Deliberative Pluralism.

CoForum is a collaboration between Open Form and Architekturhaus Kärnten with support of the Austrian Ministry of Culture. CoForum is part of a wider project of vehicles enabling deliberative pluralism and artful enquiry.

www.openedform.com

Vehicles towards a new public