DiEM Voice; To You <-> To Me; After Life: The importance of the ethics of space when staging democracy and orchestrating social spaces

In this paper I will be discussing three participatory scenographies I have developed as part of my practice and research (xristina penna+aswespeakproject). I will be looking at this work in relation to the etymological roots of the word democracy related to sharing and holding (Babiniotis, 2010) and through the lens of 4Es cognition: enactive, ecological, embodied, embedded ‘and some cases extended and affective’ (Ward and Stapleton, 2012), suggesting that human cognition is an on-going collaboration between brain, body and environment. Diem Voice (August 2016-2019) was developed for Democracy in Europe Movement 2025 (DiEM25) by applying my PhD insights of scenography as consciousness and the orchestration of a social space using sociocultural affordances and patterned practices (Ramstead et al. 2016). I devised the blueprint of DiEM Voice, a scenographic system, which generates audiences’ responses as scenography during the DiEM25 events-talks. The system also invited artists to generate original artwork in response to the audiences’ questions and suggestions regarding the political future of Europe. The second work, To You <-> To Me (2018, 2019) was a performance-action which used cord, fabric, and trust and invited audience-participants for a sharing of holding of myself and other participants. This idea of a shared holding was adjusted for Zoom space for The Other Way Works’ R&D for After Life: A one day creative on-line retreat of our most important memories (2020) and will be experienced by the working group attendants through an activity on Zoom.
These works are part of my exploration of applying 4Es frameworks to develop new approaches and habits of embodied and ecological audiencing and spectating. In this paper I will reflect on the importance of the ethics of space, which I define in my thesis as ‘the calm yet assertive way of a scenography establishing a way of being in the space for the audience–participants’ (Penna, 2018). In the specific works, when attempting to stage democracy and orchestrate social spaces there was a need of scenography, to be ‘invisible but decisive’ (Lotker, 2015:13) in order to generate encounters of sharing and holding.