The insights drawn from the clay workshop do not remain confined to that setting; rather, they provide a lens through which to understand the ward itself. If clay offered participants a malleable medium through which to register memory, gesture, and affect, the ward’s own materials operate quite differently: they are designed to resist impression, to remain traceless, and to orient bodies within ideas of surveillance and safety. [safety is subjective – do patients feel safe, emotionally and physically?] Where clay invited openness and improvisation, ward materialities often compelled linearity, visibility, and compliance. Yet the comparison is not absolute. Just as participants bent and folded clay into new forms, so too did they find ways of bending and reorienting the ward’s resistant conditions into fleeting sources of comfort, connection, or agency. What follows traces these dynamics across participants’ accounts, attending to how risk operates as the ward’s orienting force, how its material conditions attempt to choreograph the body, and how small resistances generate flickering moments when the clinic becomes otherwise.
The following chapters pursue these questions thematically, each addressing a different facet of how the objects and material conditions of the ward participate in clinical encounters. Chapter 1 examines risk as the ward’s orienting force: the gravitational logic that organises space, sound, and object design, compelling bodies into compliance while leaving only narrow margins for deviation. Chapter 2 turns to the body’s negotiation with institutional materialities, tracing how walking paths, sensory flatness, furniture, and thresholds choreograph posture, movement, and presence, while also revealing how edges and liminal sites can become ephemeral points of reprieve. Chapter 3 attends to micro-resistances and reorientations, the small acts through which patients bend resistant materialities into fleeting sources of agency, comfort, and connection. Taken together, these chapters argue that ward materialities are never inert backdrops: they choreograph movement and relation, embody the logics of surveillance and safety, and yet remain susceptible to reconfiguration through the everyday practices of those who inhabit them.
Across all seven interviews, the participants’ narratives trace how institutional atmospheres and materialities inscribe themselves into bodily experience, and how creative engagement with clay enables their reconfiguration. Beyond the workshop, participants describe everyday negotiations of agency within controlled spaces: reconfiguring soundscapes, seeking air, moving furniture, breaking minor rules. These gestures reveal the hospital as a mutable ecology of edges and thresholds rather than a total enclosure.
Scaffolding
Each chapter is structured around how bodies orient, misalign, and reorient within psychiatric space. Ahmed’s lines, orientations, reachability, and disorientation run through all three but in distinct registers.
Chapter 1: Risk as Orienting Force
Guiding focus: Risk is the ward’s structuring principle that shapes objects, routines, and encounters. It orients bodies along tightly regulated lines of movement, visibility, and legibility. Participants describe risk not as an idea but as an atmosphere — a pressure in the air, a tightening of space, a contraction of what is reachable.
- Risk logic organises everything: layout, materials, routines.
- Risk produces straight lines: sanctioned routes, expected postures, compliant gestures.
- These lines narrow what is “reachable” (Ahmed) — access to space, freedom, privacy, comfort.
- Objects (chairs, curtains, doors) act as orienting devices enforcing institutional directionality.
- Disorientation becomes a sign of risk (non-compliance, instability) rather than a site of potential.
- Yet participants generate micro-disorientations that reveal the clinic’s malleability.
Empirical Anchors
- Atmospheres of vigilance (“you can feel risk in the air”)
- Surveillance (cameras above beds, observation windows)
- Sound as orientation (alarms, footsteps, keys)
- Choreographies of queuing, waiting, walking circuits
- Objects of risk (ligature-safe curtains, wipe-down chairs)
- Clay counter-orientations (pots, typewriters, beds with cavities)
Key role of objects: To embody and enforce risk ideologies. To script what movements, postures, and relations are permissible.
Chapter 2: Bodies in the Clinic: Materialities and Choreographies
Guiding focus: How materials “choreograph” the body, shaping posture, movement, relation and sensory orientation. The psychiatric ward is a material environment that choreographs bodies — shaping posture, rhythm, gesture, and affect. Participants describe learning how to sit, lie, breathe, and move in ways that make them legible to staff. Ahmed’s orientation clarifies how bodies “find themselves” in space through habitual alignments — and how institutional materials enforce or disrupt these habits.
- Objects gather along lines: beds, chairs, windows, doors organise bodily habits.
- Orientation emerges through bodily contact: posture, pressure, reach, and touch.
- Comfort = alignment w/ institutional expectations; Uncomfortable = being “out of line”.
- Disorientation produces bodily fragmentation (Clara’s head/arms, tiled spaces, looping walks).
- Sensory flatness (lack of anchors) disrupts grounding, leads to withdrawal.
- Furniture (plastic chairs) scripts posture into upright, compliant orientations.
- Body becomes disciplined by traceless environments — unable to leave a mark but imprinted upon.
- Thresholds and edges (windows, balconies, smoking doors, curtains) as sites of intensified control and possibility: where bodies negotiate presence, visibility, and reprieve.
Empirical Anchors
- Bodily fragmentation (Clara)
- Sedation and stillness (Julia, Anna)
- Restricted movement circuits (Clara’s 2-minute walk)
- Posture scripts (chairs that enforce uprightness)
- Sound/vibration as bodily orientation (Kate)
Key role of objects: To structure embodied experience at micro-level — what the body can do, how it sits, how it orients to space.
Chapter 3: Micro-Resistances and Spatial Reorientations
Guiding focus: Orientation via deviation: how bodies depart from institutional lines and remake space. How patients bend resistant materialities into fleeting acts of agency, comfort, and connection. Participants describe subtle, everyday acts of bodily refusal, spatial improvisation, and atmospheric recalibration. These are not escapes but micro-resistances: moments where institutional lines bend, blur, or falter. Using Ahmed, these are moments of disorientation — not failure, but a way of sensing the institution from its edges. (bring orientation back to pathoplasty and la borde ‘real encounters’)
- Edges and thresholds (corners, benches, windows, curtains) are zones of potential.
- Queer orientations = turning toward other objects, other bodies, other possibilities. Beanbag chair as bodily reorientation (softness vs. rigidity of ward).
- Objects become allies in reorientation (Julia’s curtain, Cris’s spikes, Morgan’s jumper).
- Clay becomes an archive of disorientation and re-orientation (sealed pots, cavities, spikes).
- Rule-bending (smashing mug) punctures order.
- Music in the lounge as shared soundscape resisting institutional noise. Music sessions as atmospheric recalibration
- Balcony / smoking area door as sites of temporary sociality.
- These are micro-resistances: not dismantling the ward but folding its order into new constellations (links to La Borde and pathoplasty)
Empirical Anchors
- Corners, edges, window-ledges, courtyard benches
- Rule-bending and intentional mess (Kate’s smashed mug)
- Moving chairs, dragging furniture, seeking airflow
- Clay objects as disorientation-inscriptions (beds with cavities, spikes, hidden fragments)
- Queer social micro-ecologies (moments of shared breath)
Key role of objects: To be appropriated, reoriented, or re-scripted. Even resistant materials can be bent into fleeting autonomy and connection.