In 2016, Council proposed a lecture called Council: Our institutional experimentations at Tensta konsthall, introduced by the following text.

Council is an art institution founded in Paris in 2013 by the curators Grégory Castera and Sandra Terdjman, with the aim to introduce the creative processes in contexts where they are not normally found. It is an attempt to create new forms of meetings between art, science and civil society. Council tests the hypothesis that an evolution of political representation requires aesthetic operations.

Since its beginning, Council has developed their methods through three research-based projects: Tacet or the Infinite Ear (Sharjah/New York/Bergen, 2013–2016), The Manufacturing of Rights (Beirut, 2014–2015), On Becoming Earthlings (Paris, 2015), all of which take on fundamental questions about what it means to be human. The projects have explored respectively the modern concept of hearing, the construction of “nature” in law, and the measures of the anthropocene, the geological age in which man have had the highest impact on the Earth and its climate.

A council practices the art of assembling people in order to decide how to act for themselves and for those they represent. Councils are common to different cultures around the world, and are practiced at different levels of society – the family, trade unions, states, militant groups, businesses, and religious communities. Shared by all, council is an activity from which new forms of political representation may emerge.

Just as Goldin+Senneby infiltrate and imitate financial structures, the art institution Council borrows the form of the framework that they are investigating. In this lecture, Castera and Terdjman will reflect on their work with Council using specific questions and concepts that are also present in Goldin+Senneby’s artistic practice.