ABSTRACT
This is the story of a series of encounters with ‘democracy’, figured through a burnt and derelict oval room in an eighteenth-century house in Ireland. The house was designed by James Hoban the same architect who went on to design and build ‘the White House’ in Washington, DC, modelling it closely on this Irish mansion. Beginning and ending with a photographic encounter, and accompanied by two actual photographs of the oval room, the chapter is an imaginative speculation on democracy as a public encounter between equals inscribed into a house (and a political history) that has since become the victim of its own private and exclusionary forms.
