Troubling Bodies of Inquiry ~ Situatedness ~ Correspondence
A speculative spatial practice developed through sensate attentiveness, heuristic making and diffractive hospitality. It proceeds through situated encounters between bodies, materials, architectures, texts, images and atmospheres. These encounters do not seek convergence but sustain correspondence: the reciprocal alteration of bodies whose differences remain active.
Making becomes a means of spatial inquiry; interiority a condition of gathering; atmosphere a field of affective exchange; and material persistence a capacity for futurity. The resulting spatial propositions remain particular in their material conditions yet open to further encounters.
Situatedness is therefore neither a fixed position nor a disciplinary identity. It is an ongoing practice of becoming-with: a way of locating, troubling and extending the relations through which spatial propositions come into being.
Metaphysics/Atmospheric Cosmogonies : Bodies in the space of photography.
The speculative body
The title opens a question about how worlds come into being through relations between matter, space, thought and atmosphere. Rather than treating metaphysics as an abstract system imposed upon material experience, the inquiry could ask how a world is assembled through particular encounters, and how its apparent coherence is troubled by what it cannot contain.
Possible host: a philosophical community, an interdisciplinary research group, or a place where cosmological, ecological and material understandings of the world meet.
The metaphysical body troubles the distinction between abstraction and material experience.
Sainsbury Centre : Brian Clarke, Hans Coper.
The collection as a troubling body
This reference brings ceramics into proximity with architecture, glass and the institutional conditions through which objects are encountered. The productive question is not simply what Moreton might learn from particular artists, but how a collection might be engaged as a spatial body: how objects, display, architecture, histories and visitors make one another perceptible.
Possible host: a collection, museum or curatorial research programme willing to explore relations between objects, architectural interiors and embodied attention.
The collection troubles the distinction between object and architectural setting.
Diffraction ~ Hospitality ~ Atmosphere: A Situated Spatial Inquiry
Russell Moreton is developing a speculative spatial practice through which clay, ceramics, architecture, reading, drawing and material atmospheres become sites of heuristic inquiry. The practice investigates how heterogeneous bodies can enter correspondence without requiring convergence, and how their encounters might produce new conditions for spatial thinking, inhabitation and learning.
The proposed inquiry seeks a situated host whose material, historical, social or ecological conditions can participate in the development of the work. Rather than arriving with a predetermined outcome, Moreton would develop a period of attentive engagement through which the host environment, its bodies and its existing forms of knowledge could alter the direction of the inquiry.
The intention is to establish a reciprocal arrangement: a practice that contributes new ways of attending to a site's bodies and relations, while allowing that site to generate propositions unavailable within the studio alone. Outcomes might include ceramic and spatial interventions, research collages, writing, shared encounters or other forms developed in response to the conditions encountered.
The inquiry asks how diffractive hospitality might operate as a spatial practice: how different bodies can learn with one another, how atmospheres emerge through their co-presence, and how the resulting propositions can remain available for further correspondence beyond the period of engagement.
These are different problems, and they should not be forced into a single explanatory framework. Their value lies in the differences they introduce into Moreton's situatedness.
This is also where the concept of diffractive hospitality becomes useful. A host need not be an organisation that agrees with the inquiry or immediately recognises its vocabulary. It might be a place whose existing practices make the inquiry difficult, or whose forms of knowledge reveal limits in the practitioner's own assumptions.
A troubling body is one that does not simply receive the practice, but changes what the practice is able to ask.
