Chapel of Many | Open Form

Chapel

A sensorial pursuit of knowledge.

We live in an attosecond age, where restless technologies of infinite promise prompt us to keep clicking distractedly in an insatiable quest for quicker sensation. The existential threats we face (or do not face) are often formless or remote. Engaging directly with the contemporary politics of speed, The crafted ‘tool’ gives figurative shape to the collective quest for solutions to these formless threats.

‘Invited’ and ‘Created’ space.
Nearly all contentious decisions today are shaped by both structured
public participation and mobilization. The crafted, ‘invited’, space of formal participation and the ‘created’ space of mobilization.
(H. Berry et al.)

E Pluribus Unum, the Chapel of Many platforms the momentum of evolution (or revolution) when one state becomes the other. A continuity of change and transformative expression, the extension of barriers of space, stretched and broken or the collective act of reconstruction. From contained framing and focussed deliberation to expansion.

A call to breach a wall is a call to action, a call to participation, a social, political and artistic endeavour. In the theatre Berthold Brecht and, more radically, Augusto Boal famously challenged the role of the passive spectator and called for the walls of the theatre to come down.

In the 16th century, sensual knowledge became spatialised : “Sensorial experience is my guide,” declared Berengario da Carpi, for whom the “sensual evidence” (teste sensu, visus testificatio) was the only real proof of the accuracy of anatomical knowledge in anatomy: “anatomia non notat insensibilia.”

Its not just about gathering different sides of the debate, its about who gets to debate and how. What is and isn’t present to our senses – hearing, seeing, touching, playing.

To be able to be truly deliberative, to bring everyone in to the conversation, we need to approach from multiple angles, perspectives, including the sensory, bringing in new ways of being. Not just about language and communication, but also ‘being, and sensing – how we ARE with each other. Are we literally occupying the same space? We don’t pay enough attention to the sensory aspects of what it means to be equal. That’s the presupposition of democracy, not the goal but the pre-supposition. But does our comportment reinforce that or does in reinforce hierarchies, in relation to images, mediation, the work of the aesthetic. (Kagri Jain)

Symbolic counter-speech responds to a symbol on its own terms, countering the message presented by a particular symbol while using that symbol as the vehicle or medium for the contrary message. Symbolic counter-speech includes a range of expressive actions, from silent non-participation with a symbol or symbolic ceremony to confrontation of the symbol with a different, contrary symbol, to attacks on the original symbol by destroying it or altering it to create a new message.
(Howard M. Wasserman)

The Cathedral without a roof, the deliberative space without walls, the first iteration of E Pluribus in the form of ‘The Chapel of Many’ occupied the ruins of Coventry Cathedral as part of National Refugee Week in 2019.