The project emerges from the precarious socio-economic conditions of post-austerity Britain, where towns such as Ipswich exemplify the uneven geographies of decline, disinvestment, and tentative regeneration. The aftereffects of prolonged austerity measures, compounded by political polarisation and global instability, have manifested in landscapes of vacancy and redundancy. These environments are caught in a state of suspension, oscillating between deterioration and the speculative promise of renewal.

Carl Morton’s Fronts situates itself precisely within this liminality. By intervening in the facades of disused buildings, the project activates what Henri Lefebvre (1991) describes as the “production of space,” wherein the urban fabric is not merely a passive backdrop but an active field of social, economic, and symbolic struggle. The “front” here operates doubly: as the literal architectural surface and as a metaphorical construct, a mask or staging that mediates between absence and projection. The work thus draws attention to the dialectic between the material residue of the past and the ideologically overdetermined futures that urban redevelopment so often promises.

Morton’s gesture destabilises the semiotic authority of the facade as a surface for advertising and civic propaganda. By replacing or disrupting these communicative forms, Fronts reconfigures the facade as what Jacques Rancière (2004) might call a site of dissensus—an interruption of the “distribution of the sensible” that ordinarily channels public perception into legible, consumable narratives of progress or decline. Instead, the work proposes futures that are both unknown and, in a sense, predictable: they reflect the recurrent cycles of gentrification and regeneration while resisting the linear teleologies of urban development.

In staging this act of defamiliarisation with a self-reflexive “whimsy,” the project also acknowledges what Hal Foster (1996) terms the “return of the real”—the ways in which contemporary art confronts social reality without presuming to resolve it. Morton foregrounds art’s paradoxical position: simultaneously implicated in processes of urban change (often mobilised as a tool of gentrification) and yet striving for critical distance. His framing of the project as a playful meditation on art’s “inept potential” for social change underscores this ambivalence. It is less an assertion of art’s transformative agency than an exploration of its failures, contingencies, and minor disruptions—what Brian Massumi (2015) describes as “quasi-causal” effects that ripple subtly through social and spatial fields without producing immediate or measurable change.

Ultimately, Fronts positions itself not as a solution but as an intervention into visibility, surface, and narrative. It discloses the ways in which provincial urban environments are imagined, commodified, and forgotten, while opening fleeting possibilities for re-imagining them otherwise.

References
Foster, H. (1996) The Return of the Real: Art and Theory at the End of the Century. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Lefebvre, H. (1991) The Production of Space. Oxford: Blackwell.
Massumi, B. (2015) The Politics of Affect. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Rancière, J. (2004) The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible. London: Continuum.

Carl Morton, September 2025.