Process
Through individual search or as part of the collective body of the camp, tent X is an enclosure for both the immaterial and material dimensions of the political imaginary. At each situation these are encoded through working schemas which form of basis of the tent's interventions and texts
tent X sets out a working template for political agency:
the passage from Social Imaginary to Public Imagination. Without the making of a social imaginary, no form of political agency is meaningful; without engagement with Public Imagination, no political movement is effective. Between the two is the working space where the tent is pitched.
docs:
Parliament Square byelaws 2000
Court Judgements:
29 June 2010
Appeal 16 July 2010
Royal Courts of Justice, London May-July 2010:
Within the 4 walls of a court room, all the complexities of civil life are considered within legal frameworks - in the case of Democracy Village, the byelaws under which the Mayor of London manages the grassed area of Parliament Square on behalf of the Queen, its owner.
Over several weeks, the Judges and the teams of lawyers coped with the life that Democracy Village brought to the court room, dramatic at times, perhaps too dramatic for Justice Griffith Williams who cleared the public gallery from the 22 June.
At the end of the legal process what transpires is understandably predictable and dry.
As an open autonomous space, Parliament Square free of byelaws, progressively became the site of congregation for a broader range of citizens including the homeless and many dependent on alcohol and other substances. Village life was never uneventful but evolved into an amalgam that asked complex questions about the place of subjects living on the edge within political mobilisation.
This is not new: in the past, Christiania in Copenhagen, the Pure Genius site in Wandsworth have dealt with the same issues. If political processes are allowed time and a gestation period, new forms of organisation may evolve and the aesthetics and the social constituency changes.
tent X was created for Democracy Village, Parliament Square Gardens - the home of democracy in June 2010.
In Parliament Square Gardens, the tents emerge from below as it were, from the cracks within society and its legal frameworks, between the devolved free-market-led myriad of byelaws, patched up for several years by security laws and new policing measures in the wake of the War on Terrorism.
^ Democracy Village
Teilhard De Chardin forecast the coming 'social totalisation and planetisation' and the inevitable changes that will bring to our present state of society and therefore its governance - the evolution beyond the atomisation that current social system is based upon to a new society based on fundamentally new ways of social interaction and exchange and being.
In the in-between phase that we are in, Don Tapscott speaks of wikinomics the new forms of economics through mass collaboration - would there be a parallel to this with the political dimension, say wikipolitics or devolved forms of wikidemocracy?
If there are to be new ways of defining mass political participation for the future, how to engage in the making of such possibilities? This is a vital and urgent task - otherwise the danger is that we see technology and capital as the the sole agents of change: if so that would only perpetuate existing imbalances. Thus the importance of tent X.
tent X is a free anonymous tent which may be occupied by anyone: you, me, ...
X = the single vote that we each have,
the X of choice to exercise democratic free-will.
Thus X = unit of the free sovereign subject, the citizen.
^ tent X