The Table of Matters is an evolving collaborative installation displaying on a shared working table a collection of quotes and visuals, drawn from the presenters´ personal archives.  The material, selected from the near and the distant past, is organised in new constellations, allowing multiple reading paths and illuminating different critical positions. Thus it questions some parameters of our political presence, for instance: “boundaries”, “languages”, “living together”. In which spaces are we situated? Are we where our body is, or are we situated in the place that our gaze can reach? Are we “citizens” of the status quo, we are witnessing? Or are we inhabitants of cities  we can build up with our imagination?  And – quoting Italo Calvino – what is the breadth of our gaze? 

In a dialogical collaborative process intertwining individual reading, discursive interactions as well as poetical rewriting and visual editing processes, we invite the participants to appropriate the shared “matters”, considering both the given political parameters and their personal positions. The aim of this methodology is to build up a shared environment in which groups of citizens can re-use creative and artistic operations in order to activate democratic imaginative processes and to open up spaces of linguistic negotiations.  Specifically, it focuses on the critical and imaginative force freed through the relationship with alterity. The “foreign” character of the excerpts  forces participants to rethink their positions starting from an “other”, radical perspective. Confronting the singularity of specific languages, for instance philosophy or poetry, responding to their obscure and sometimes illegible character, participants are invited to move away from common concepts and narratives, to conduct their thoughts through unforeseen paths and to prefigure future scenarios. The name of the installation plays with the plurivocity of the English word matter, which indicates both the “theme”of the discussion”, but also the “material”, therefore an “empirical element to be transformed”. 

The verb “to matter” indicates “what counts”, “what is relevant”. Visual and text excerpts  on the table represent the material of a thinking still to be formulated,  while the work on the table constitute an attempt to pronounce the questions that should be addressed by the community around the table. Matters that matter.

Format

PARTICIPATORY INSTALLATION AND WORKSHOP

Duration : 3 hours

Number of participants 15

3 Working Tables :  

“Boundaries” – “Languages”- “Living together ”

Each Table is composed by:

• Series of about 20 A4 portrait print, displaying reedited and commented philosophical and literary quotes.
• Series of about 7 A4 landscape prints, displaying a set of driving questions.  and connecting topics to reorient the reading experience.
• Series of about 5 colour prints, displaying visual sources

BOOKLET 

15 copies of a booklet for the participants. It entails a list of operations to interact with the matters on the Table.