Where can we meet?

What of the un-shareable is there to be shared?

It’s not that we have to meet. It’s not a must; but a possibility. To realize it, we would have to find a good place and something worth sharing. The trouble is that most places are governed by protocols that tell you how to go about meeting people. What is being shared there is therefore rarely worth sharing. At the end of the day, maybe only the un-shareable is. Then how do you go about sharing it?

The Greeks went to the Stoa to share thoughts, uninhibited by protocol. The Stoa is a park in front of the house or just outside the city. In this space neither the laws of the household, the Oikos, nor those of the market, the Agora, fully apply. You can roam around freely in the Stoa. That’s why it was the place where Socrates could be found, any day, walking about aimlessly, conversing with people, sharing their thoughts, questions and concerns - all of them, particularly the stranger ones, the more existential ones, the potentially un-shareable ones. For in the Stoa no holds are barred. This is the spirit out of which Academies were born. It will be summer. So, for a brief moment, let’s walk about and create a Stoa!

Experience shows that the best way to avoid conventional protocol is to invent your own terms of engagement. You need to formalize to then be able to improvize. So the formal brief will be simple: printed matter will be produced, pictures will appear on posters in the city, and words or sounds will be aired, on each single day of the Academy. So whatever we end up sharing, especially if it should be un-shareable (or brutally clear), may potentially be considered worth taking to the public. As something will go to print or be broadcast the following day, to collectively decide what was, or is, or may be worth sharing at the end of every day, will then become the articulation of different minds, working not in unison, but sharing their difference, in the state of a Stoa.