Saint George’s Dragon – Newsletter and Conversations
Saint George’s Dragon is also planned as a publication focussing on the paradoxical nature of public space by examining a set of local controversies: a folded poster makes a pamphlet consisting of both text and images, one side features a controversial project, often an artist’s public work, while other side has two texts, each taking up a different side of the controversy. As a series, each issue builds on earlier issues, responding to the overall theme of spatial paradox, to the urban conditions in Guelph and also to earlier texts and the conversations they provoke. The third part of the programming of Saint George’s Dragon is the six conversations to be held on the sculpture, open to the everyone. They are participatory debates about the nature of Guelph’s common spaces structured around the following six paradoxes: 1 People assemble because they have something in common, but at the same time they do so because they disagree with others. Some recent political theories emphasise disagreement as the prerequisite of any political assembly, while others focus on the affinities that draw people together. If both of these claims are true, then public space must accommodate both consensus and dissent. As Guelph pursues redevelopment policies in the central city, its central square should be seen as both a space of agreement, and a space where conflicting visions of citizenship can appear. 2 There is some confusion about whether ‘public space’ refers to spaces funded and built by an elected government, or to spaces appropriated by citizens, often to contest government policies. This paradox emerged with the rise of modern democracies. With the appearance of elected representatives, a gap opened between citizens’ demands and the motivations of government. Public space emerges in this context as a locus where people can present themselves to others without representation. 3 For Jürgen Habermas, the public sphere that emerged in the eighteenth century was a space that was both physical – in streets and social spaces, and virtual – in newspapers and journals. 3 Today the Internet appears as an even less material medium. Recent political movements, such as Occupy Guelph, intervene in complex hybrids of immaterial and material public spaces.
4 A public is always a group of people, but public spaces include inanimate materials and countless other forms of life. Latour argues that the split between people and things is the foundational ruse of modernity and many of our most difficult problems can be traced back to it. 4 Guelph has long been a centre for agricultural studies and is one of the country’s most important sites for experiments in sustainable farming, but the city is also a space of poverty, food scarcity and hunger. Food security in Wellington County brings together challenges of sustainability, involving non- human actors with the very human problem of affordability. 5 Political theorists Nancy Fraser and Michael Warner, argue that we should understand publics as multiple, as counterpublics, conversations within which smaller groups can build arguments, gestures and practices in opposition to a dominant culture. 5 In Guelph, police infiltration of local anarchist groups has raised important questions about the ongoing importance of the privacy of these groups to the perpetuation of open public discourse. 6 Architectural historian Pier Vittorio Aureli claims that politics was born with the polis , the ancient Greek city-state; the roots of urbanisation lie in the voracious expansion of the Roman urbs and its base unit, the military camp. 6 Today, instead of discrete polities with defined boundaries, we have a continuous and planetary process of urbanisation. The conversation between the polis and the urbs, the city and ex-urban sprawl, is relevant everywhere, Guelph included.
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3 Jürgen Habermas. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, translated by Thomas Berger. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996. p27-42 4 Bruno Latour. We Have Never Been Modern. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993. p10-12 5 Nancy Fraser, ‘Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy’ in Social Text No. 25/26 , 1990. p56-80. Michael Warner. ‘Publics and Counterpublics’ in Publics and Counterpublics. New York: Zone Books, 2005. p65-124 6 Pier Vittorio Aureli. The Possibility of An Absolute Architecture. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2011. p1-47.
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