Course: Unit 04 Gathering

This year Unit 4 will make optimistic proposals for communal gathering spaces. The
unit will interrogate ideas of ritual, festivity, generosity, intimacy and interdependence,
and will identify different ways in which we gather — to celebrate; to work; to play
and watch sport; to socialise, drink and dine; to protest or to perform civic duties; to
commemorate and to mourn. Have the events of this year changed how our public spaces
and institutions look and operate; has it changed how we use and value them? How can
we still make culture?
The unit will be based in St Davids, a small, picturesque city on the south west tip
of Wales. As the resting place of St David (Dewi Sant), the city has been a place of
pilgrimage and a focal point for gathering since the 6th Century. Today, the seasonal
pilgrimage of holidaymakers seeking the open coastline floods the streets in the summer
months and ebbs away with the approaching winter. Despite it’s city status, the principle
settlement is the size of a small town and is quaintly known as the smallest city in the
United Kingdom. The wider city boundary encompasses a rolling landscape of farmland
dotted with small hamlets, halted by an abrupt and often precipitous descent into the sea.