This is the first in a new series of pieces that take a look at a channel and its broader threads, themes, and ideas through a few of its blocks. We’re starting with Clemens Jahn and his channel "Tables," which he explores more fully in an essay in our forthcoming Are.na Annual (
December 2020).
My Are.na channel “Tables” dates back to 2013, when I began collecting images of tables in preparation for a workshop I was organizing at the neue Gesellschaft für bildende Kunst Berlin (The New Berlin Art Society). The workshop, titled “Building Tables,” was part of
a larger exhibition and event program, a critical retro- and introspective into the art society’s direct democratic organizational structures.
In the workshop, the participants were given the task of collaboratively creating a table that could represent a direct democratic form of assembly and organization. The group came up with a one-legged circular table, which required at least two or three people standing around it to prevent it from toppling. The more evenly distributed the people were standing, the more stable and firmly the table would become.
Clemens Jahn is a Berlin-based art director, design strategist, and creative consultant.