About the parliament
At its 4th edition, The Visible Award conducted its biennial Temporary Parliament in the United States, at the Queens Museum on December 2, 2017.
The event convened a Temporary Parliament that engaged new audiences with nine art projects shortlisted for that year’s award. Members of the public and assembled experts and guests from many fields gathered to experience presentations, discussion, and debate, followed by an open vote that determined the recipient of the 2017 Visible Award. The public jury session around the ten shortlisted projects was introduced by Michelangelo Pistoletto, and chaired by Laura Raicovich, Director of the Queens Museum. Elvira Dyangani Ose, Senior Curator at Creative Time and previous Visible Curatorial Advisor, took over the role of the advocate for all the ten shortlisted projects.
The Queens Museum has a long-standing commitment to socially engaged art, and its New York City Building was the location of early meetings of the United Nations from 1946 to 1950, making it ideally suited to host Visible’s Temporary Parliament. This history was influential in determining the Queens Museum as a partner and impacted the design of a physical space of the Parliament, that could facilitate a democratic decision-making process.
The Visible Temporary Parliament has been conceived by London-based design studio The Decorators, as an assembly, questioning the spatial typologies that have dominated parliament chambers from Athenian times to the present day.
The recipient of the 2017 Visible Award was BRIGADA PUERTA DE TIERRA (BPDT), a grassroots artist collective formed in 2015 in the periphery of Old San Juan (Puerto Rico), mostly by children and young community members, centring its activities on the preservation and well-being of the neighbourhood, its history and its people. BPDT uses art as a tool to challenge top-down standard urban development practices.
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