A Topogrammatical Passage Through the Architecture of Learning

The Peripatos Manœuvre is not a performance, a lecture, or a guided tour — though it borrows sparingly from each. It is a situated aesthetic method: a passage through institutional space structured by attentional movement, citation, and the spatial syntax of pedagogy. Grounded in the peripatetic tradition of Aristotle’s Lyceum, the Manœuvre treats the art school not as backdrop, but as a text — read, parsed, and punctuated through movement.

What is the art school in the 21st Century?

What has it become?

Peripatos Manoeuvre #3  (2019), Holden Gallery, Manchester (UK)

Peripatos Manoeuvre is not an intervention - it is a tuning

Each Manœuvre follows a pre-composed route, marked by fourteen “stations.” At each, a quotation is read aloud — drawn from philosophy, education, aesthetics, or poetic theory. These are not thematic embellishments, but textual provocations. Delivered in precise spatial context — beside a studio door, within a corridor, or at the threshold of an office — they activate new registers of resonance. The Manœuvre does not invite confusion or loss, but sharpens attention to what is already present and overlooked.

The participants — or percipients — walk with the artist as co-readers of space. Together they encounter a living grammar embedded in the institution: walls become clauses, stairwells parenthetical turns, studios conditional propositions. Each quote is selected with care, placed with intention, and arranged to draw out latent structures of meaning across time and context.

The Manœuvre does not intervene in daily rhythms. It absorbs them. It moves with the flow of the quotidian, not to disrupt but to attune. It makes the over-familiar newly legible.

Whether actuated at Manchester School of Art, the University of Dundee, or elsewhere, the Peripatos Manœuvre refuses the framing of art as spectacle or disruption. Instead, it proposes a return to art as reading, walking, listening — a movement not of wandering, but of grammatical attunement.