Being In Public – Encounters | Outside Place / Inner Space International Symposium panel discussions

In 2017, Household was invited to be part of the Being In Public | Encounters | Outer Place / Inner Space international symposium, which investigated the interconnected role of the performative collective/action and the citizen in the making and changing nature of public space/s and thereby changing and transforming individual citizens themselves.

Organised by Belfast based performance collective Bbeyond, the symposium started on the basis of an openness about public space as a social and political realm essential to democratic life and as a place of physical design. It was informed by the political and moral philosophy of Hannah Arendt, and her position that this realm is where citizens negotiate, mediate and take collective action for the common good. Modernity she contends, has manufactured “distracted citizens” alienated from the public and the ‘common world’. It is this social and political terrain that initiated the open ground and framework for the symposium.

It proposed to examine the potential of contemporary performative art practice in the public realm as an activating ‘temporary community’ which by expanding the field of performative practice can interrogate public being and space in the wake of modernity’s psychological and economic effect.

Speakers included Kim Gurney, Cherie Driver, Sandra Johnston, Chumpon Apisuk Guy Sioui Durand, James Hennessey, and Marita Bullmann