ABSTRACT
Walls, cities, states and art are relational assemblages. The oldest building in Parliament is Westminster Hall. If walls could speak its lives, we would hear coronation banquets, the feasting of palaces, courts and traders selling wigs and scribes. This chapter considers the visuality of materiality as manifested in the contours of citizen and denizen space(s). Treated as embodied practices, the very textures of how spaces are produced, demarcated, sedimented, disrupted and re-invented, assumes the imbrication of materiality with visuality. The archi-textures of both stable and tenuous demarcations are considered beyond any materiality/visuality dichotomy both inside/outside the walls, as well as the perimeters. Auditory rhythms of communication within and beyond the walls distinguish what Ranciere calls the "sayable" and visible in the "distribution of the sensible". Thus part performance, part fun fare and part respectable art making and viewing within the consecrated walls of the British Academy.
