The Unmentionables Symposium is a biannual event highlighting critical issues concerning the constructed environment. It provides a forum for rarely mentioned ideas in spatial practice and theory. The inaugural symposium in April 2017, hosted by the Woodbury University Interior Architecture Department, featured compelling presentations and panel discussions that brought together a broad range of renowned designers and thinkers from literature, architecture, film, art, philosophy, and interior design.
The second Unmentionables Symposium looks to revisit this rich interdisciplinary territory by revising the form of the symposium itself as both a place and an event of performative potential. In Ancient Greece the sympotic designated a social institution that circumscribed a public space within a domestic interior. It was a gendered, formal arrangement—a banquet of philosophical speeches that encouraged performativity and intellectual risk-taking with the aid of libations. Beyond anesthetic intelligence the ancients saw a rich world of aesthetic promise, charting trajectories of intelligibility between intoxication, spectacle, hazard, and failure. The 2019 Unmentionables Symposium attempts to fulfill that promise by showcasing the intricacies of sharing insight beyond the strict confines of cognitive content.
