Open on all sides to the city, Adrien Sina’s Democracy Pavilion is conceived as a performative architectural display acting as a precious casket which magnifies discussion in urban space, a clearing made within the tangled labyrinth of political decision-making which always excludes the public. It brings forward his earlier projects of 1995, Matrix of a Planetary Ethics and Planetary Parliament of Peoples and Minorities, and his activism in the field of Performing Rights, 2006.
Intimate as a venue, festival artists and visitors can use the space to meet and to exchange ideas. It contains a conference table surrounded by low stools. Most political decisions take place remotely via commissions in closed conference rooms following entirely opaque processes. In contrast, the visibility of the Pavilion from without and within is essential: it is a place with no windows or doors, where children may run freely through its spaces, from one entry point to another.
In praise of irregularity, like his more complex Dance or Torqued Pavilions, this work of plaited wood takes us back to the earliest dwelling places, the moment when branches became protective. The structure serves primarily to mark the contours of a space reduced to its bare materiality — just the rhythm of open woven limits, the play of sun and shadow which orchestrates the thoughts of the protagonist-spectators as they move inside and debate. Ethical, ecological, AdrienSina’sDemocracy Pavilion offers space to the individual, offers discourse to silence or the chant of hate, offers resilience to precarity: offers a future to the present.
Sarah Wilson
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Adrien Sina is a curator, performance art historian, architect & artist. He has curated cross-disciplinary exhibitions involving architecture, performance, video and philosophy: ‘Fugitive Fluctuations’, 1995; ‘TragédiesCharnelles’ & ‘ImmanencesSpatiales’, 2000; ‘Feminine Futures: Performance, Dance, War, Politics and Eroticism’, Performa Biennial, New York, 2009. Through curatorial advisory, theoretical essays or key loans, he has contributed to the historical sections of ‘Art, Lies and Videotape: Exposing Performance’, Tate Liverpool, 2003; ‘Traces of the Sacred’, 2008, ‘Dansersa vie’, 2011, Pompidou Centre; ‘Futurism’, 2009, Tate Modern, ‘Inventing Abstraction’, MoMA, 2013; ‘The Great Mother’, Palazzo Reale Milano, 2015. He was Thinker in Residence at London’s Live Art Development Agency, advisor for ‘PSi #12, Performing Rights Festival’, 2006. Solo exhibitions: ‘Archaeology of Desire’ at t1+2 artspace, London, 2005, ‘Archaeology of Desire II – A history of medical gaze & flesh’, Richard Rogers’ NEO-Bankside Pavilion, London, 2012-2013. ‘Feminine Futures’ was exhibited at The Consortium Contemporary Art Centre, Dijon, 2014. ‘Feminine Futures – The Membrane of the Dream I & II’ were shown at the Museum Langmatt, Switzerland, 2015. Forthcoming publications at the Presses du réel: Marc Allégret, ethno(cine)photography of intimacy – Travels in the Congo, 1926-27, and, following its first edition of 2011, the extended version of Feminine Futures – Avant-garde female artists in the fields of performance & dance through film & photography in six volumes including Futurism, Antique Modernity, European & American Expressionism and Contemporary. He lives and works in London and Paris.