The Island, the Bench, and the Sofa at Home: Sensations of Communion in the Exhibition Town Hall Meeting of the Air

This paper outlines the ways in which the collaborative exhibition ‛Town Hall Meeting of the Air’ deployed poetic tools across writing, installation and radio programing to invite sensations of communion among its hybrid audiences. Through this exposition it reflects on ways these sensory tools offer valuable ways for people to participate in public life. It offers these as alternatives to common understandings of what it means to be civic.

The paper locates the exhibition’s staging in the UK’s easing of social protocols during the Covid-19 pandemic, citing the collective reimagining of social infrastructures at the start of the pandemic as an important context. It thinks with Irit Rogoff’s writing on forms of participating with art, to navigate how the exhibition as both a physical installation, broadcast and in-person event, can invite feelings of togetherness in physically dislocated audiences.