Carol Mancke
Rehearsals for a public table

27 July- 5 August 2023
open:27-29 July & 3-5 August
Thurs- Sat 11-6pm
PV: 5 August Sat 7-9pm
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Hannah Arendt used the image of a table as a metaphor for our common world. Made up of the
things we humans build together and everything that happens among us, within and around those
things, our common world both gathers us together and keeps us from falling over each other.
But, she argues, it only becomes a public reality when each thing within it can be seen by everyone
in their own way without changing its identity, that is, when we know we see sameness in utter
diversity (The Human Condition (1998) p 57).

Thinking with Arendt, I imagine a round table, with you and I and others seated around it, such
that we find that our varied positions offer different perspectives on anything placed upon it. We
would see the same thing differently and in so doing, perhaps, bring a shared public reality – a
public realm – into being.

I will bring one such table to Five Years to take up residence for two weeks this summer. I invite
members of the Five Years collective to join me and my guests for Rehearsals for A Public Table, a
series of conversations and other forms of being, thinking and doing together that might ‘swim
against the tide of efficiency’ (Shoji Morimoto, Rental Person Who Does Nothing (2023)).

Activities will take place Thursday – Saturday (27-29 July and 3-5 August) 11:00-18:00 
Public view 19:00-21:00, Saturday 5 August.
Let me know you are coming (carol@machinaloci.com), or just drop by!

 

Guests include:

Dameron Codds: (Haunted Network Research Initiative):
28 August, 13:00 (www.hnri.xyz)

Nayan Kulkarni:
3 August, afternoon (https://nayankulkarni.com/)

Elizabeth Tomos:
5 August, afternoon (https://elizabethtomos.com/)

Mercedes Vicente:
4 August, afternoon (https://parsejournal.com/article/a-river-with-standing-personhood-in-te-ao-maori/)

Nicole Vinokur:
4 August, 11:00 (http://nicolevinokur.com/)

Fran Cottell:
4 August, morning (http://www.francottell.com/)

 

Some things we might do:

Sit or read together in silence
Share stories
Read aloud
Wiggle and jiggle
Read out of sync
Make sounds or music
Voice complaints
Listen
Talk
Sing
Draw
Make things
Help build a new table
Watch me
Witness what’s happening
Make food and eat it
Mend things
Questioneer
Walk

 

Context

In 2015 with Arendt’s ideas in mind, I made a large round table I called Table 18 for the number of
humans who can sit comfortably around it. A map etched into its surface included plans of six real
sites where urban protest took place between 2011 and 2015. I conceived the table as a symbolic
unit of resistance and/or a catalyst for solidarity. After a first outing as a discursive space within
Why would I lie? the Royal College of Art Research Biennial, Table 18 became the locus of
explorations of public collaborative thinking in multiple settings, leading to the idea of the public
table.

In 2018, I took over a shopfront in Berkeley California to open machinaloci space, a place for
playful research into alternative ways of being, thinking and doing together. Over the next four
years, machinaloci space hosted conversations, residencies, commissions, workshops, artist talks
and exhibitions. The main occupant of this space was Table 15, my second large round table, and
an active participant in a process of nurturing a community of inquiry into being.

My work with tables was central to my PhD research (RCA 2021), throwing up questions which
continue to engage me. One of these is about the embodied character of individual and
collaborative thinking. Our bodies come with us whenever we gather to think. Any collaborative
thinking we might do with language is always underpinned by the thinking our breathing bodies do
in silent proximity. Thinking together with bodies involves interaction, making and doing things,
speaking, moving, arranging objects and spaces, creating images, performing and exploring
environments to capture ideas and feelings that individuals cannot know on their own. With our
bodies come the values, structures, affordances and limits of our society and culture. The space
we occupy, and the extensions of our bodies and minds we arrange within it – tables, eyeglasses,
coffees and teas, notebooks, computers, pacemakers, high heels, artificial knees, etc. – bring other
possibilities and constraints that affect our thinking. All these things participate in our
collaborative thinking, and in whatever communities of inquiry we might enable.

Ben Spatz, scholar of embodied research methods, writes of the body as a delicate hinge between
ecology and technology,1 reminding me of the long narrow piece of fabric I tied around my waist
before entering a Hindu temple precinct in Bali. I was told that the selendang symbolically divides
the good or clean upper body from the evil or dirty lower body and that wearing it would help me
to reflect on these two aspects of human life and thus enter the temple with the clear mind
appropriate for religious worship. As a person embedded in Western culture, I am accustomed to
seeing only the upper parts of teachers in classrooms, pundits on screens, and important humans
of the past in sculpted busts. I sit at desks and tables that sever the upper and lower parts of my
body and unconsciously use metaphors that define practices that are above or on the table as
open and appropriate and those under the table as secretive, untrustworthy or underhanded.

My tables draw groups together, offer opportunities for shared experience, bounce light and
sound to gathered faces and ears, etc. They also tie us down, trap our bodies, constrain our
movement and generally thwart whole-bodied thinking. A table might link and separate
individuals sitting around it and allow a public realm to emerge, but it also splits those sitting into
parts that can be seen and parts that cannot – dividing talking heads from the guts, legs and feet
that support them. It constructs an above and an under, encouraging us to distinguish a rational,
acceptable and light-filled world above from a separate, mysterious and unlit world below. It
persuades us to forget that thinking is an organic process connected to all the sticky, damp, smelly
and messy parts of life.

The world is not simply the things we build and the affairs between us, it also includes the material
of us, and that brings with it all the animate and inanimate things and beings we rely on. And so, I
propose to think of my table as a kind of selendang that, by clearly dividing us in half, reminds us
what we hold together through the fact of our bodies. What if each time we sit at the table that
separates and holds us together and draws a line across each of our bodies, we reflect on our
responsibilities in and for the world and in doing so find the clear minds appropriate for thinking
together?

Although too big to occupy Five Years as a table, Table 18 will come with me as fragments, which I
will use in a series of arrangements/installations whilst I assemble a new table, Table 16. Perhaps
an apt reflection of the sense of the shrinking promise of the public realm in London 2023, our
conversations will take place at and amidst fragments of tables wedged into a too-small humanmade
space.

 

A few prompts:

Existential hinge
Units of protest
Kinning
Mushrooms at the table
Solidarity
???
What do you think we should rehearse at a public table in 2023?

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1 Embodiment as First Affordance: Tinkering, Tuning, Tracking.
In Performance Philosophy (2017) Vol 2. No. 2: 257-271.

Right: Table 18 in action at Tate Exchange 2016 (photo by Ben Smith)