The Minor Gesture : The Diagram of the Painting/Fielding the Feeling of Force taking Form

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The plurality alive in art, always risks being overtaken, colonized, immobilized and arrested by the forces of encounter it invites. Yet paraphrasing Nietzsche, Deleuze writes, a force would not survive if it did not first of all borrow the features of the forces with which it struggles. What a will wants is to affirm its difference. Through the will to power, force takes form.

Active force always risks capture by reactive force and the risk of translation, of rendering work within a stabilizing narrative of identity or representation.

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The diagram of the painting/drawing is its feeling of force taking form that is itself in movement.

Relationscapes, Erin Manning.

Propositions of Force/Appetition.

The Work's Diagram.

The force of the work is an emergent way of looking, more than an actual taking form.

Raveningham Diagrams for Sensing the Landscape. 2023.

Opening the present to its potential for experiential complexity.

Opening to the indeterminacy of experience.

Creating work that remains open to an infinity of potential evocations.

Making works that resonate with an ontogenitic plurality of sense(s). 

The same object, the same phenomenon changes sense depending on what force which appropriates it. Deleuze.  

We become sited in the fielding of the quasi chaos of microperceptions, an experience that leaves us out of breath, our muscles tense with the twitching of kinaesthetic empathy. We move with the intensive magnitude of the micromovements moving.

Erin Manning.

Landing sites choose us, creating an associated milieu that worlds the body-environment. 

Some are perceptual, some are dimensionalizing, some are imaging. 

Organism-Person-Environment

A decision is like a hook onto the environment to gain traction on it.

Fielding how we think-feel.

Nothing happens without kinaesthetic instigation and corporeal proddings.

A landing not so much into a place, as a dancing into attendance.

Architectural Body, Arakawa/Gins. 2002.

A choreographed encounter is never, wholly what it seems, you can't really choreograph movement because we are constantly in a process of fielding our surroundings, which also fields us. How we think-feel is a space-time of experience alters where and how we can experience it. This fielding is how Arakawa and Gins define a landing site.

Erin Manning. 

The decision of the landing site is its focusing into experience.

For Whitehead a decision is a becoming actual of a virtual potential, and decision is what gives the event form and by consequence creates an individuation. The decision is the separating off, the honing in that makes a particular tonality take form.

We Land into the focus of an awareness that becomes us.

Actuality is the decision amid potentiality. 

A decision creates the potential for consciousness, not the other way around.

Whitehead. 1929/Erin Manning-Interlude.

For Arakawa and Gins, landing sites corner experience in the making.

A landing site is an activity that is as expressive as it is organizational.

Apparatuses/Diagrams

Holding their form, their bodies pause, the camera waits for them.

In the work's final form, the force of its potential can still be felt, this is the works diagram.

The camera focuses these sites into an in-gathering that captures them as transitory thought-feelings. We feel the shift from dances in the making to haptic experiments in the viewing.

The camera works with the tensile activity of the dancers minimal gestures, moving now to one side as though filming four bodies in one, suspending our attention in tandem with the suspended bodies.

Sculpting in Time.

Films heavy with the languor of relationships forming between bodies, ground, and partitioned space.

For Tarkovsky, the presence of the camera is felt as though it were another body, forcefully moving us to watch, constraining us to see not only a location or a dance, but the tensile rhythm of groundedness itself. The camera bis not there only for the recording, it feels the weight of the waiting, physically as we watch. These shifting affective tonalities are landing sites. They are what Arakawa and Gins call a depositing of sited awareness.

Erin Manning.

Fielding Assemblage : Trace/Diagram/Canvas/Paper/Studio Wall

Textual/Conceptual Forces/Siting Awareness.

Cultivation Field Research Collage

Geological era 1800.

The deep intervention into nature by humans as biological and geological agents.

The Anthropocene denotes a new framework of thinking and action.

A space where the individuals mental reality meets 'cultural narratives'

Social Conditioning/Underpinning Education.

Spatial Register between Consciousness and Social Existence.

Windows/Boundaries between the personal and the commonly shared. 

Confessional Animal/Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

Corpus/The Individual Presence/Jean-Luc Nancy

Camera Obscura of Ideology/Sarah Kofman

Ceramic Diagram of Interlocking/Partitioned Spaces.

From Models to Drawings.

Spatial Tonalities/Affective Environments 

Filtered Light.

Atemwende, a breathturn : Adam Gopnik and Edmund de Waal

Craft and Art : Skill and Anxiety.

Craft is logic, and art defies it. The defiance is what makes art. The serenity of the artisan lies in her knowledge that it can all be done again. The anxiety of the artist; lies in knowing that if it is done again, she has become an artisan. (Gopnik,2014:7)

Edmund de Waal is a maker of objects with imagined histories. (Gopnik,2014:11)

Atemwende : A breathturn.

Edmund de Waal.

The Great Glass Case of Beautiful Things:

About the Art Of Edmund de Waal

Adam Gopnik. 2013.

‘Actually, I still make pots, you know’ Edmund de Waal.

The Sensuality of the Clay Body.

‘You have to work quickly and with definition, and your ideas have to come into focus with enormous rapidity.’ Edmund de Waal, on working with the different presence demanded on ones mind and hand whilst throwing with porcelain. The practice of porcelain forced a change in colour and finish in his work. New glazes, shimmering celadon and shiny black, arrived to catch the light and send it back. (Gopnik,2014:9)

The throwing of pots still remains central to his practice. ‘The material goes down, gets wet, is pulled open by the hand, spins- and then produces, as if by magic, the most transcendently human of all made things; volume, inner space, an interior, the carved out air that connects the morning teacup with the domes and spandrels of San Marco. There’s nothing there but clay and air, then there’s defined air. (Gopnik,2014:6)

Ceramics and Architecture.

Exhibition Spaces of the Enlightenment

The Porcelain Rooms

The pot, ancient as it is, is the first instance of pure innerness, of something made from the inside out. Building objects upwards is, in its way, an obvious and brutal thing; it derives from piles, and makes pyramids. Turning objects inward, on the wheel, is a subtler one, and derives from our need to have a place to put things in. (Gopnik,2014:7)

Together these new porcelain vessels collectively produced by De Waal are an experience of possessed space.

These collections of vessels in their Modernist vitrines seem to be both an expression of the architecture of a collection and simultaneously an affirmation of an interior space that can hold the singularity of a breath within a small pot.

‘ The ceramic module that he uses, the small pot, is deliberately made as non-functional as possible.’ (Gopnik,2014:9)

‘Even if we insist on seeing them impersonally, the sheer force of their numbers creates the poetic sense inherent, as Homer knew, in all inventories. They gang up on us.’ (Gopnik,2014:9) These groupings of objects placed together produce their own narratives, their own relations, and lines of inquiry. In so doing their ordering of the space around them brings meaning to those spaces. This is reinforced through the poetry and metaphor of the effect of ceramic vessels on space, as cited by De Waal himself through Wallace Stevens’s “Anecdote of the Jar” 1919.

‘The Jar, the elemental made thing, takes dominion over the unmade world. The air around it suddenly looks “slovenly,” insufficiently jar-like. Made things remake the unmade world. (Gopnik,2014:10)

Gopnik comments that we can’t look at hollow things without sensing their hollowness, as he notes we perceive haptically as aptly as optically. This allows us to read these vessels through both our sense of sight and our sense of space. The result is that we feel these objects; we can sense the heft of them made from their weight, shape and size. We become aware that we can feel objects as much as we can see them.

De Waal’s work brings about a sensuality and an empathy manifested between the strict ordering of his presentation through his vitrines and cabinets and the fragility and grouping of his porcelain vessels. This empathy promotes our interest with the interior parts of his groupings, with the interior emptiness and mystery of things we can only sense. His control and command of the geometric spatial relations found in his installations is juxtaposed by the multitude of diminutive interiors and negative spaces.

The relations of the architectural and those of the vessel are in constant flux, held in some sort of spatial narrative that seems to meditate stillness, like the museum these vessels are protected and intact, yet strangely they are held hostage by their surroundings.

The empathy we feel for their emptiness is perhaps choreographed, staged and ultimately forced, these are not just pots as De Waal admits but pots that have been by design rendered as non-functional as possible although they still bare the marks of his franchising. This neutering of his thrown clay forms into the realm of perhaps a purely sculptural object that is itself now a mere component in his Minimalist cabinets. What remains is a hollowness, but a contrived hollowness that speaks of spaces designed not made; unlike his Signs and Wonders intervention for the V&A, these works feel orphaned and cut adrift by their surroundings.

Does? ‘His art takes a familiar grammer of display and turns it into a poetry of memory. Inside a room, a great case filled with rows of porcelain pots.Along each row, a story. Inside each pot, a breath. (Gopnik,2014:11)

Overflowing Forces~in-acts of Sympathy with the Anarchic share of Existence.

Extreme Atmospheres : Fired Clay Labyrinths.

Interpenetrations~Visual Art Materialisms.

//russellmoreton.academia.edu

Clay~Anarchive Matter(s) : Transitive Forces of a Minor Key.

Research-Creation as Spatial Practice.

Clay Bodies~Baffles : Atmospheres and the Continual Weather World.

On a making that is a speculative pragmatism reaching out into the more-than anarchic share of existence, creating the conditions for living better. Moreton/Whitehead/Manning/Ingold.

Making Processual Architectures.

Clay+Ceramic+Anarchive : Minor Gestures~Interstitial space of emergent expression

An anarchive is a dynamic, creative, and "feed-forward" process that acts as a repository of traces rather than a static, traditional archive. Coined by philosophers Brian Massumi and Erin Manning, it functions as a "living" collection that encourages new, generative creations and potential rather than merely documenting the past.

Key Characteristics of an Anarchive

Active Process: Unlike an archive, which preserves and fixes, the anarchive is in constant flux and continues to evolve, focusing on potential rather than just the past.

"Feed-Forward" Mechanism: It is a "springboard" or "curating score" that triggers future artistic, social, or research-based work, rather than just acting as a reference to a past event.

Traces vs. Documents: Anarchives collect "traces" or fragments of events, which are seen as "carriers of potential" for further, often unpredictable, development.

Subversive Nature: It acts against the rigid, linear, and "destructive tendencies" of traditional archiving.

Collaborative & Experimental: It often involves the co-creation of knowledge, often in the form of multimedia projects, such as the anarchive.net project. 

The term is often used in arts-based research, such as the "Walking Anarchive" project, to describe how researchers can work with memories, experiences, and artistic materials in a non-linear way. 

Mapping Relationships : Contexts and Locations #2

Mapping Relationships : Contexts and Locations #2, a photo by Russell Moreton on Flickr.

17022013

Outpost Studio~Theoretical Spaces : Undone~Overflowing Gatherings of Experience.

Lost Inquiry : Dispersed Spaces~Relations of Space, Time, and Social Bodies.

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Expanding The Files.

Undone

A theorist is one who has been undone by theory.

Rather than the accumulation of theoretical tools and materials, models of analysis, perspectives and positions, the work of theory is to unravel the very ground on which it stands. To introduce questions and uncertainties in those places where formerly there was some seeming consensus about what one did and how one went about it.

Irit Rogoff : What is a Theorist? 2006

• Russell Moreton
• visual art
• visual fine art
• spatial practice
• research creation
• ecology of experience

Becoming Propositional/The Human Neuron.: Each Proposition/Activates Contrast/The Dialectic of Duration.

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The Dialectic Of Duration, Gaston Bachelard. 1950

Bachelard argues for a discontinuous time, made of instants out of which we construct new durations and deconstruct old ossified ones. A time experienced as durations that addresses the nature of time in its irreducibly fractured and interrupted state, and within which Bachelard urges us to launch projects and lead lives of creative rhythms. 

Becoming Propositional.

Developing in the Incipiency of Relations/Ecologies between Things/Phenomena.

One has to realize what restraint it needs to express oneself with such brevity. Every glance can be expanded into a poem, every sigh into a novel. But to express a novel in a single gesture, joy in a single breath: such concentration can only be found where self-pity is lacking in equal measure. These pieces can only be understood by those who believe that sound can say things which can only be expressed through sound.

Arnold Schoenberg, from the introduction to the Six Bagatellies for string quartet, Opus 9, by Anton Webern, a Viennese friend and contemporary of Egon Schiele's.

Rachel's, Music for Egon Schiele. 1996.  

Individuations Dance/Relationscapes

There is no time to return to the line, the line must draw the movement, the gesture itself must become line. One pass with the paint and that's all, move the canvas. The result a vastness of localized movement, a movement across that is at once microscopic and macroscopic.

Erin Manning.

The Swimming Pool Drawings

Michael Grimshaw, Winchester School of Art.

We land into the focus of an awareness that becomes us.

Whitehead. 1929.

The architecting of spacetimes of experience co emergent with bodies in the making.

Choreographic Propositions/Mobile Architectures, Erin Manning.

The choreographic proposition  serves not to delineate positions or forms from one another in a normative practice of movement notation, but to create a diagram that captures in a fleeting moment the qualities of movement expressibility, such that their force of form can be felt.

Deleuze defines the diagram via Francis Bacon as the operative set of asignifying and non-representative lines and zones, line-strokes and colour patches, whose function is to be suggestive. He  speaks of the diagram capable of unlocking areas of sensation, suggesting that the diagram is chaos, catastrophe, but also a germ of order or rhythm.  

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In Closing.

OURSELVES

Here, on the edge of what we know, in contact with the ocean of the unknown, shines the mystery and the beauty of the world. And it's breathtaking.

I believe that our species will not last long. It does not seem to be made of the stuff that has allowed  the turtle, for example, to continue to exist more or less unchanged for hundreds of millions of years; for hundreds of times longer, that is, than we have been in existence. We belong to a short lived genus of species. All of our cousins are already extinct. What's more, we do damage. The brutal climate and environmental changes which we have triggered are unlikely to spare us.

For the Earth they may turn out to be a small irrelevant blip, but I do not think we will outlast them unscathed – especially since public and political opinion prefers to ignore the dangers which we are running, hiding our heads in the sand. We are perhaps the only species on Earth to be conscious of the inevitability of our individual mortality. I fear that soon we shall also have to become the only species that will knowingly watch the coming of its own collective demise, or at least the demise of its civilization.

Carlo Rovelli. 2016.

It could be said that the most fantastic material is the human neuron. It dominates most materials around it, it is a prime agent of change and determines many forms on the planet.

For Cragg, ninety-nine percent of those forms are solely utilitarian, driven by survival and economics. The result is an impoverished material world. Utilitarianism censors the possibilities of form, this not only applies to designed objects and architecture the world over, it also applies to forms of education and society in general.

Our super-thinking material the human neuron with that prime position in the hierarchy of material, has a responsibility for all other material within its grasp whether mineral, plant or animal. 

Tony Cragg, Sculptures and Drawings. 2011.

Each Proposition

Activates Contrast.

Architectures based on a full recognition of the embodied human condition and of the multitude of instinctual reactions hidden in the human unconscious. A piece of furniture sets up a proposition for a event, the encounter with itself and the body of the user.

Alvar Aalto's buildings are not based on a single dominant concept or gestalt; rather they are sensory agglomerations. They sometimes even appear clumsy and unresolved as drawings, but they are conceived to be appreciated in their actual physical and spatial encounter, 'in the flesh' of the lived world, not as constructions of idealised vision.

Juhani Pallasmaa, Alvar Aalto.

Choreography As Propositional/Relations/Generative Practice.

Choreography starts from any point, it cleaves an occasion activating its relational potential. It makes time, beginning its process anew, always from the middle of the event. Choreography is thus a proposition to the event. Choreography asks/inquires into the event, how its ecology might best generate and organize the force of movement-moving.

William Forsythe, Erin Manning.

Choreography, a self generating act proposed into a movement/potential motion/event of a milieu/gathering.

Making/generating/organizing as a proposition/task/technique to the material.

Developing in the incipiency of a choreography creative ecologies of the force of movement/making/movement. 

Tony Cragg/In and Out of Material.

Carlo Rovelli/Seven Brief Lessons On Physics.

Intertwining Thinking and Making.

Architecture and the Senses.

Juhani Pallasmaa/The Eyes Of The Skin.

Bayfield Hall.

Making and deploying theoretical objects/installations/workshops.

Exploratory Clay/Ceramic based inquiry.

Creative entanglements in a world of/with materials/others.

CLAY.

Ceramic Components/Composite Sculptures.

Templates/Painted Cardboard. 

Extruded/Sledged/Moulded. 

Julian Stair/Art, Death and the Afterlife.

Sainsbury Centre.

As proposition to the event, choreography does so not by abstracting itself from the event but always as part of the event, it can never be separated out from its coming-into-itself-as-event. 

Choreography/unfolding-as-event is the fielding of a multiplying ecology in a co;constitutive environment, it develops in the incipiency of the in-between, spurred on by tendencies that waver between  the rekindling of habit and the tweaking of a contrast that beckons the new. 

For an event to tune itself choreographically many techniques are necessary. Techniques can be generated as tasks, or they can be self generated. 

Chorepgraphy as a generative practice must ask, how the tasks become propositional, how the coalescing ecology becomes more than the enabling constraints that set it into motion.

Erin Manning.

On The Body of Drawing/Demarcations

Localized/Relational/Choreographic.

Transparency/Translucency/Erasure 

  

What Remains/Of The Other Sister

Dead on Arrival.

The life drawing separated from its corporeal event is now just a representation marooned in its media.

The Life Room, a space where an individuals mental reality meets cultural narratives.

Spatial Practices/An Affective Intensity~Agencement : Thinking Matter : Between Human/Spatial Relations

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An Affective Intensity.

The juxtaposing volatility of abjecting spatial and human bodies.

Spatial Agency/Assemblages~Agencement in constant relational movement.

Abstracted-Diagrammatic-Inhabitations.

Expulsions from/for relational bodies.

A Provisional/Speculative Framework.

Tuschimi's Equation : A framework that sets out a logical outcome, but where the insertion of event introduces a deviation, a slippage from the planned/programmed outcome. Such that the 'architecture' is indeterminate.

Event=Space-Movement.

Creating Disjunction, superimposing assemblages of event/space/movement over(entangling) one another.

A Becoming Architecture.

To provoke potentials to occur.

Contracts (Architectural Transcripts), scripting spatial relations that utilise fictional scenarios in real spaces, are used as a way of working with temporal events.

Here architecture is pushed towards and over its limits to the point where it is no longer 'architecture' as we know it. But rather an architecture, an anticipation of an architecture (social construct) to come.

Immediate Architectural Intraventions.

Spatial Practice.

Thinking Matter : Between Human/Spatial Relations

WSA 2007-Outpost 2024

Real Space + Fictional 'Event'

The architectural origin of each 'episode' is found within a specific reality, and not in an abstract geometrical figure.

Tschumi.

Minoritarian Architecture/Deleuze.

They produce a type of labyrinth, with a momentary impossibility of escape.

They are architectures in a constant state of change, perpetually agitating the discipline's established norms.

Abject (ion) facilitates an affective intensity.

Art works (workings) made from an expelling human body in relations with spatial bodies.

Waiting Rooms

Soul Cages.

Black Books

Installations

Ceramic/Architectural Propositions

Zuzana Kovar.

Abject(ion) is a discussion of bodies of assemblages.

Abject events render a particular indeterminacy. There is an aim here through abject(ion) to re-purpose architectural methodologies in order to contemplate abject(ion) and specifically contemplate its dilution of boundaries between bodies. It is critical to reiterate that abject(ion) through its volatile and leaky nature inevitably comes to encompass more than one body.  

Material Markings/Inhabitation.

Life Drawings/Frottage/Graphite/Charcoal/Concrete.

Winchester Weeke Centre 2006.

A Sensation of Looking/Manifesting Seeing

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A Sensation of Looking/Manifesting Seeing

Matters of Concern/Fact.

Drawing/Contingency/Sensing/Seeing

Drawing away from descriptive depictions that illustrate preconceptions/aesthetics.

Julian Stair.

Quietus. 2012.

The Vessel.

Death and The Human Body.

There is an alchemy to making ceramics. We take an inert material, fashion it, dry it and expose it to heat and flame. The practice of cremation, of exposing the body to fire, going through an alchemical change, echoes and parallels the process of firing.

Julian Stair.

The materials he works, lead and clay are dense, both physically and emotionally. But Stair's use of these materials is not representational. These objects do not depict or illustrate, instead they enact and embody.

Stair's achievement in this cyclical exhibition is to have expressed both the universality and the specificity of death, each as an aspect of the other.

The great hand-thrown jars that stand at the heart of the exhibition exemplify this doubleness. Though completely abstract, they exist at the scale of the body. They invite a tactile response, visitors might stroke the ridges circumscribing the jars or tap them, or even give them a gentle hug.

Glenn Adamson.

Life drawing on the psychology of  nakedness and the human body in contemporary art.

Life-Class/Anatomy/Pathology.

The practical and theoretical problems of the confrontation with the human form.

Georg Eisler.

Herbert Boeckl.

His nudes speak a physical language, interpreting life and death in terms of human bodies, of functioning muscle and bone and the tactile aspects of flesh, and the knowledge of what lies beneath/behind it. 

Alfred Hrdlicka. 

A Group. 1973.

Proximity does not read as intimacy, the entangled naked bodies convey a sense of insecurity.

The Posed/Nakedness/Social Scrutiny.

The Life-Class.

Isabel Bradshaw/Michael Grimshaw

Drawings/Sculpted lines that bring sensations onto the surface of the paper.

Lines of Movement/Vectors

Lines of Static Forms/Boundaries

Mark-making, rendering the spatialities of the human form.

Form-Movement

Mass-Volume

Skin-Surface

Line is only the visual interpretation of an extremity of a volume. Mark-making on a drawing becomes a conduit for a sensation of seeing others.

The concept of anthropomorphism is central to the identity of pottery. We use bodily terms such as a neck, shoulder, hip and foot to describe the constituent parts of a pot. And the very nature of the vessel as a container, a holder of things, is analogous to the idea of the body as physical container for the soul or spirit.

Julian Stair.

Scaffolds/Tentative Architectures : Drawing Architectural Surrounds

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Space And Subjectivity.

Collage with glass and documentation from Francesca Woodman.

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Making/Building made indeterminate through a retention/questioning of a framework and the insertion of an event that introduces a slippage/deviation of that of a framed outcome.

Bernard Tschumi. (equation as a provisional framework)

Tentative/Processual Architectures. 

Arakawa and Gins.

Lucy Orta.

Shortcomings of Phenomenological Thought.

One places oneself at the centre, designates oneself, measures oneself and uses oneself as a measure. One is in short a 'subject' and space is a projection of oneself or its counterpart, that it is defined therefore not in its own right, but in relation to the subject. Space, my space is not the context of which I constitute the 'textuality' instead it is first of all my body and then it is my body's counterpart or other, its mirror-image or shadow. It is the shifting intersection between that which touches, penetrates, threatens or benefits my body on the one hand and all other bodies on the other. This maintains the boundaries between body and space, subject and object.

Henri Lefebvre.

Phenomenology always stops at boundaries, at the boundary of the body, which is precisely where abject(ion) continues beyond. It is because phenomenology concerns the lived body rather than bodies in a plural and more general sense that it is a discussion of wholes rather than transitions and exchanges unable to accommodate volatile processes.

Inhabitations : Cultures Of Melting Snow.

The In-Between.

There is no room for the in-between, no way to describe exchanges between entities and the effect of those exchanges. All is static and no cannot as Francois Jullien wrote of Plato, think of the snow in the process of melting. One can only think of either snow or water, but never the process of change.

Abject(ion) Architectures of Process, with brings to the fore interrelated areas of Relational Architecture and Emergent Phenomena.

Architecture in Abjective(Abject (ion) States of Subjectivity.

Frameworks/Scaffolding.

Affective Matter/Mattering.

Kovar turns to Abjection a concept developed by Julia Kristeva, abjection-abject(ion) is both process and product, and can hold a discussion of the transgression of borders. It concerns anything that crosses the symbolic, anything that is expelled literally or figuratively, and that is necessary to keep at bay in order for subjectivity to prevail, issuing from abject(ion) is therefore a threat to our subjectivity, a threat to the boundary between Subject-Object/Body-Space.

Expanding on the processual and material nature of abject(ion), such an undertaking begins with Event and is rounded off with discussions of Affect and Matter.

Zuzana Kovar.

A Disclaimer.

Following Deleuze this book is interested in what 'Abject(ion)' does, rather than what it is.

Drawing (at times) on aspects of the same theory, Kristeva is interested in the disruption of psychological boundaries and Deleuze who deals with both psychological and physical boundaries. Through Deleuze we are able to engage with abject(ion) more holistically.

This book is not concerned with making 'abject' architecture, that is making buildings with abject matter. But is rather concerned with developing ways of thinking about bodies, spaces, and the relations within and between these through the lens of abject(ion).

Architecture in abject(ion) promotes an interest revealed by a sensibility that favours theory and textual practice over images and objects, and goes towards explaining why illustrations of examples referred to throughtout are withheld.

Project 3.1

Body aject(ion) space: A collection of contracts.

The Contracts is the collective name given to a series of projects that explore the notion of abject(ion) as event. Critically, The Contracts are not only explorations (as accommodated by Tschumi), bur also spatial events (as accommodated by Deleuze), and hence the architecture that is defined by the interplay of these events. Given the centrality to this book of the simultaneous abject(ion) of human bodies and spatial bodies, and the indiscernibility in which this results, The  Contracts have come to span a period of three years, hence establishing themselves as the most developed body of work included here.

Architecture in Abjection.

Bodies-Spaces-and Their Relations.

Zuzana Kovar.

A Species of Spaces.

Reclaimations, between a desk and a skip.

Russell Coates.

Archive Mappings/Concerns : Lines/Linkages/Nodes/Points/Intersections.

Architectural Constructs/Events into Material/Making.

Abject (ion) : Affective Resonances/Matter : Clay+Ceramic.

Vessels/Voids/Making from folded spaces.

The simple issues of attending to the material.

Re-Casting Matter, not 'materials'.

Becoming mindful of 'materials' and their 'hylomorphic tendencies'.

Clay retains transitions and exchanges, collects up discrete entities/symbols/inscriptions, places them into volatile spaces/processes of change .

Questioning Subjectivity : Fluidity of matter/material out of place.

The Cinema of Catherine Breillat.

The Process of Abject(ion).

In critical theory, abjection is the state of being cast off and separated from norms and rules, especially on the scale of society and morality. The term has been explored in post-structuralism as that which inherently disturbs conventional identity and cultural concepts. Julia Kristeva explored an influential and formative overview of the concept in her 1980 work Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, where she describes subjective horror (abjection) as the feeling when an individual experiences or is confronted by the sheer experience of what Kristeva calls one's typically repressed "corporeal reality", or an intrusion of the Real in the Symbolic Order.

The process of a body excreting from within itself. A transition between inside and outside, a disruption of physical and psychological boundaries of the still prevalent understanding of body as subject and space as object.

A moment of indiscernibility, the result of which is the product of repulsion, the abject and where body, space and abject become an ambiguity, ranging in intensity from subtle gestures to confronting actions immersed in the viscosity of our leaky bodies.

• Russell Moreton
• visual art
• visual fine art
• spatial practice
• research creation
• ecology of experience