What kind of city would women create to facilitate rest, work, care and governance?
I am working on a new project with artist & designer Cristina Garriga of My Bookcase: Rebuilding the City – the philosophy of women ~ looking at Socratic Dialogue – or group philosophy – as a tool for understanding and redesigning the city.
An initial period of research, supported by SCAN, has allowed us to spend time in Amsterdam in the studio and at Atria, shaping the idea. In Summer 2017 Cristina Garriga (My Bookcase) trained as a moderator of Socratic Dialogue with Dutch philosopher Humberto Schwab.
The values of the Socratic Dialogue are:
1. We are moral creatures and we need shared values
2. Formulating a question collectively is the first step towards the creation of knowledge
3. Concrete personal experiences can lead to the creation of knowledge
4. The art of listening can bring you out of automatized thought
5. Everyone is able to philosophize
Based on the provocation that one – unconsciously – treats their life as a narrative Socratic dialogue uses, what is described as tactile knowledge (experiences and memories over references) and no preconceived agenda, for the sake of exercising creative thinking.
The aim of these sessions is to allow the space (time) to open up individual narratives, to overlay them and remap them in order to create a new and plural/collective understanding of complex and open-ended questions.
Watch this space...