Russell Moreton : Matter(s) in Correspondence

Outpost 261124

An Affective Intensity.

The juxtaposing volatility of abjecting spatial and human bodies.

Re-entering / 2026 — What was once explored through the instability between human and spatial bodies now returns materially through the permeable ceramic body: surface, aperture, interior and exterior becoming conditions of relation.

Or, more open:

Re-entering / 2026 — The provisional situation becomes a body: porous, relational and open to forces, events and other bodies entering through it.

I prefer the second because it doesn’t explain the historical relationship too explicitly. It allows the reader to discover it through the work.

spatial bodies → situations → scaffolding → diffractive relations → exploratory making

Spatial Practices / An Affective Intensity pushes this further towards bodies and relations: spatial and human bodies, assemblages, movement, event, abjection, leakage and indeterminacy. The important thing here is that the spatial situation isn’t merely represented—it becomes something that produces potentials and affects relations between bodies.

This one is important, and I would treat it somewhat differently from Bricolage Processes. It is a much more concentrated record of the theoretical development of your spatial bodies and, importantly, of your attempt to think spatial practice through indeterminacy, event, movement and relations between bodies.

Archival / Anarchival

Spatial Practice.

This is one of the clearer documents of your earlier spatial thinking, but I don’t think its value lies simply in its theoretical references. What is important is the methodological proposition running through it.

The post begins with the volatility of “spatial and human bodies” and immediately understands spatial agency as something in constant relational movement. It then moves through assemblages, event, space and movement towards an architecture that is deliberately provisional and indeterminate.

The phrase “A Provisional/Speculative Framework” is particularly important. The framework isn’t there to establish a final architectural proposition. It establishes conditions within which an event can introduce “a deviation” or “slippage” from the planned outcome. Architecture consequently becomes something that can become otherwise.

That connects very strongly with your current thinking about diffractive scaffoldings.

The scaffold is not a programme that determines the result. It is a provisional structure through which other bodies, forces and events can enter and alter the situation.

The important transition

There is also a particularly significant passage here around abject(ion).

The post describes abjection as something that “dilutes boundaries between bodies” and stresses that its volatile and leaky nature inevitably encompasses more than one body.

I think this is an important predecessor to your present language of permeability.

But I would not simply translate abjection into permeability. They are not the same thing.

Rather, the older work was asking:

How might boundaries between bodies become unstable?

The current ceramic work is asking something more material:

How might a body become a threshold through which relations occur?

That is a genuine development rather than a repetition.

The ceramic aperture, perforation, chamber and surface now give a physical material condition to questions that were previously explored through architectural propositions, installations and theoretical situations.

Spatial Agency/Assemblages 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.

Migration judgement

Very high-value archive.

I would put this in a particularly strong four-post constellation:

The Scriptorium
→ creates an experimental spatial situation

Bricolage Processes
→ develops the method of gathering and juxtaposing bodies of material

Spatial Practices / An Affective Intensity
→ theorises bodies, events, movement and indeterminate relations

Formwork / Enclosures / Iterations
→ develops provisional material scaffoldings through which those relations can occur

And this is where I think your phrase “an attentiveness to situations as a kind of spatial theorizing that is itself exploratory and experimenting with other bodies” becomes really useful.

That is not just a description of these four posts. It identifies the continuity running through them.

The older spatial practice was already experimenting with situations rather than producing fixed spatial answers. What has changed is that clay increasingly becomes the situation’s material body.

That gives you a very convincing trajectory:

architecture → spatial situation → scaffold → body → ceramic body → permeable chamber

And importantly, it isn’t a story of abandoning architecture for ceramics. It is more like architecture becoming materially redistributed through clay.