On January 26 Kristine Samson gave a talk at rum46. The talk discussed various places of participation. How is it linked to an empowerment of people and how participatory spaces are linked to spatial, aesthetical and social powers. Viewers or citizens are often encouraged to engage but an invitation is constructed by artists, curators, cultural institutions. So what is the space of participation, how does it model our engagement and what are the empowering infrastructures – economical, technical, political, spatial – when we are invited to participate. Through various examples from contemporary art and culture, the talk will discuss paradoxes of this phenomenon as a distributed but also often disguised power."