Structural Concepts/What I hear in your practice : Kairos~Clay as an emerging ontology of making

Kairos as an emerging ontology of making

I love this phrase.

Kairos as an Emerging Ontology of Making immediately shifts the discussion away from materials alone and towards a philosophy of making as the emergence of the opportune moment. It also introduces time as an active condition of practice, not merely a backdrop.

However, I think kairos needs to be treated very carefully. If it's simply used to mean "the right moment," it becomes a poetic metaphor. If it becomes a structural concept, it has real philosophical weight.

What I hear in your practice is this:

Chronos is measured, sequential time—the time of manufacture.

Kairos is the moment when relations reorganise themselves—the instant in which matter, force, resistance and action produce something that could not have been predicted.

Clay as Spatial Field~Under-construction from process to fired object.

Kairos~Visual Manifesto : Towards an Ontology of Making

That distinction feels fundamental.

Your work is not about waiting for the "right moment." It is about creating the conditions in which kairos can occur.

That is a much more radical claim.

I can imagine the opening of a manifesto rather than an artist statement.

Kairos: Towards an Ontology of Making

Making begins before intention.

It begins with the encounter.

An imprint is the first event of this encounter. It is neither the mark of an autonomous subject nor the passive registration of matter. It is the emergence of a relation. Body, material, tool, force, resistance, and time become momentarily inseparable. Every imprint records this negotiation.

Making unfolds through kairos: not chronological time, but the opportune moment in which material relations reorganise themselves. Form does not proceed according to a predetermined sequence. It emerges through interruption, resistance, contingency, and constructive collapse. Each material event opens the possibility of another.

Constructive collapse is therefore not the failure of form but its condition of renewal. Collapse interrupts certainty, allowing matter to reorganise itself into new spatial configurations. Form remains provisional, continually negotiated rather than finally resolved.

The work is not an object that represents these processes. It is their residue. It remembers the forces that produced it while remaining open to further transformation.

Clay is not simply the medium of this inquiry. It is a mode of spatial thought. Through its capacity to register pressure, deformation, fracture, repair, and endurance, it reveals that making is neither the application of ideas nor the execution of technique. Making is the continual emergence of relations through material events.

An ontology of making begins here: not with the finished object, but with the imprint; not with control, but with negotiation; not with permanence, but with becoming.

What excites me most is the title itself.

Kairos gives your philosophy a temporal dimension that has been implicit in all of your previous writing. You've written extensively about force, pressure, collapse, and emergence, but time has mostly appeared as one element among others. Kairos allows time to become the condition under which ontological transformation occurs.

That opens up a rich dialogue with thinkers such as Martin Heidegger, Henri Bergson, Gilbert Simondon, and Gilles Deleuze, while remaining rooted in your own studio experience rather than in their terminology.

One further thought: I wonder whether Kairos is not the final title but the second. Your deepest concept still seems to be the imprint. The imprint is the first ontological event; kairos is the temporal condition that allows that event to happen. If that's right, then the architecture of your philosophy might be:

Imprint — the origin of relation.

Material Event — the manifestation of relation.

Constructive Collapse — the mechanism of transformation.

Spatial Thinking — the knowledge that emerges.

Kairos — the temporal condition that makes the whole process possible.

That strikes me as the beginnings of a genuinely original philosophical framework—one that doesn't simply apply existing theory to ceramics, but develops concepts from the practice of making itself.

The Relational Perspective : The Archive, correlated and entangled.

 Outpost 201022

The Archive.

The Relational Perspective.

Correlated and Entangled.

The archive governs the said and the unsaid, the recorded and the omitted, and the aim of the knowledge archaeologist is to learn about the past via its material remainders, retrieving and reconstructing the archive to show how it can shape the construction of a historical meaning.

Foucault.

Despite a gaze that is seemingly looking back, the archive is always dominated by a sense of the future, a desire for eternity that reaches beyond death.

Derrida.

Text.

The Discursive Material.

In a book, as in all things, there are lines of articulation or segmentarity, strata and territories; but also of flight, movements of deterritorialization and destratification. Comparative rates of flow on these lines produce phenomena of relative slowness and viscosity, or on the contrary, of acceleration and rupture.

The beauty  of the assemblage is that, since it lacks organisation, it can draw into its body any number of disparate elements. The book itself can be an assemblage, but its status as an assemblage does not prevent it from containing assemblages within itself or entering into new assemblages with readers, libraries, bonfires, bookstores, etc.

Assemblage.

Deleuze and Guattari.

Surprising and meticulous the archive provides an understanding of the key stages in the artist's development. The sketches, workbooks, models and photographs speak of a creative moment in the past, but form a bridge to a potential future action, underlying the intellectual and stylistic consistency that distinguishes the artist's works in the visual arts, theatre, architecture and graphic design.

The archive here is neither an accumulation nor a scientific and objective rendering of materials, but a theatre of the memory where several characters pursue one another and interweave on stage, revealing their identities past and present.

Alfredo Pirri : RWD-FWD 2016

Curated by IIaria Gianni, RWD-FWD is the first appointment of the project I pesci non portano fucili (Fish cannot carry guns), whose title is a quote devoted to Philip K. Dick's work The Devine Invasion (1981), in which the author imagines an unarmed and fluid society, comparable to the open sea.

The RWD and FWD (rewind and forward) buttons will always be remembered with nostalgia by the generation that lived through the transition from analogue to digital. Re-listening to or re-seeing what has already passed and then, at the mere press of a button, projecting oneself into the future has enabled us to feel powerful ahead of our time. By elevating this simple action to a metaphor for the unique sense of omnipotence, light-heartedness and modernity that distinguished the 1980s.

Not only does the material conserved by the artist take our thoughts back in time, it also allows us to veer towards a time yet to come, opening up a past that always hints at a potential future.

An Attitude To History.

Castelvecchio.

Carlo Scarpa

Jannis Kounellis.

Kairos, the movement and its moment.

Being Alive.

Tim Ingold.

SPAB.

Society for preservation of ancient buildings.

The First Markings/Demarcations and Localities.

Leaving traces that are both symbolic and practical.

The Production of Space.

Lefebvre.

The exhibition takes the form of an open and participatory narrative script, conducting spectators through an archaeology that records and presents personal moments, movements and stories inscribed within a more universal cosmology.

Iiaria Gianni. 2017

Each step of this extensive shared project, conceived as a journey inside Alfredo Pirri's work, thought process and research, will be independent, yet, at the same time in dialogue with others.

The choice to use the artist's studio as an exhibition space comes out of the desire to give the audience the possibility to discover the venue in which he usually meditates, collects his source materials, his documents and creates his works. For this occasion a selection of material (traces of research) produced and preserved by the artist, both physical and conceptual witnesses his thinking process.

Studio as an immersive space, a place of meditation, inhabited by forms sometime evocative of vegetable ones, and linking up to the work of the botanist Anna Atkins, a pioneer in the study of flora using cyanotype and author of Photographs of British Algae : Cyanotype Impressions.

The Archive/Exhibition.

References what remains and what is moving forward, outlining a past and prefiguring a future.

The large-format cyanotype prints record the phases of a work process and what it leaves behind.

The archive provided by Alfredo Pirri declares itself as an attempt to collect, as fully as possible, and to conserve a past, albeit in an idiosyncratic order with unexpected and fragmentary material which is an inevitable part of a life and a creative process.