Phoebe Eustance explores how institutions like QUEERCIRCLE can embrace ‘malleability’ as a radical practice.
What forms of care, collectivity, and resistance might emerge if we treat institutions not as fixed authorities, but as porous, reconfigurable, and responsive? These questions have shaped both my own artistic research into Institutional Psychotherapy at La Borde Clinic and my recent collaboration with QUEERCIRCLE.
This piece explores QUEERCIRCLE’s collaborative turn by mapping its wider ecologies and reflecting critically on its positionality as an ‘institution’. The provocation, “Can an Institution be Malleable?” borrows its shape from Susana Caló’s essay ‘Can an Institution Be Militant?’ (Caló 2019), which reflects on Félix Guattari’s call for an analytico-militant institutional practice that enables “patients to participate in their own care and contribute to the care of others” (Caló 2019, 119). Guattari, drawing from La Borde, envisioned institutions as experimental, relational forms capable of transformation. This opens up another question: what if, alongside militancy, we consider malleability as a political orientation?
Militancy, by definition, is necessarily outward-facing: it delineates an oppositional stance against systems of domination that prevail across political and social movements. Malleability turns the focus inward. It describes an institution’s capacity to reflect on and transform its own structures, practices, and power relations. This transformation is not episodic or exceptional but embedded in the everyday, unfolding through practice as opposed to protest. Within this context, malleability refers to auto-malleability: the agency of networks and collectives within an institution to shape it from within, rather than being shaped by external governance or ideology for political gain.
Rather than framing militancy and malleability as opposites, we can draw on Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s queer concept of beside-ness to consider how the two can sit adjacent to one another (Sedgwick 2003, 8-9). This allows us to explore what emerges in the spaces in-between, where critical resistance and inward transformation are not treated as a binary, but as processes that can overlap and inform one another.
In 2023, QUEERCIRCLE published Queering Creative Health, a report that reimagines health not as cure or closure, but as an ongoing negotiation of care across bodies, resources, and relationships. Such a frame is instructive for institutions too. If health is a process rather than an end state, institutions oriented toward creative health must also treat their forms as provisional, and therefore be attuned to feedback, open to re-composition, and accountable to those they hold. This is where malleability becomes more than a metaphor. It signals a practical disposition: to bend without breaking; to privilege listening and iteration; to treat governance as a choreography rather than a script.
Institutional shapeshifting
QUEERCIRCLE’s location within London’s Design District raises interesting tensions. The architectural language of polished concrete, hard lines, and glass façades carries the aesthetic of civic authority. Yet within those walls, QUEERCIRCLE resists the gravitational pull of that aesthetic: programming is co-devised with partners; staff roles flex around projects; space is shared and re-arranged according to need. A queer orientation invites us to see institutions not as monolithic structures, but as constellations that are shifting, overlapping, and always in flux.
This use of constellations recalls Jean Oury’s practice at La Borde Clinic, where care pathways were never pre-determined but continually reassessed through the question: “What is the constellation around this patient?” (Belmar 2025). For Oury, understanding care meant situating each person in a wider network of relations—staff, other patients, spaces, routines, rhythms—that shaped their experience of the clinic. Similarly, QUEERCIRCLE, as a self-defined ‘organisation in process‘, recognises that its vitality depends on the quality of its relational field.
During one research session, we mapped the informal exchanges that make up QUEERCIRCLE’s ecology: someone borrowing a badge-maker; a pot plant given as a gift; a room repurposed at short notice; a partnership that begins as mutual advice and becomes a residency. These seemingly minor exchanges reveal a vital undercurrent: the institution is not its policies or building, but the texture of relationships it convenes. In this sense, QUEERCIRCLE operates as a host arranging conditions under which different practices can meet, friction can be held, and new alignments can emerge.
Queer ecologies
Conceptualising QUEERCIRCLE’s collaborations as queer ecologies helps articulate this mode of operation. The Institute of Queer Ecology describes queerness at different scales. At the level of the individual: mutability—the capacity to transform, to refuse singular identity or trajectory. At the level of the collective: mutualism—relationality, symbiosis, in-contact. Read together, mutability and mutualism provide a language for malleable institutions: forms that change because they are in relation, and that sustain relation by staying open to change.
So, can an institution be malleable? If we understand malleability as an ethic of ongoing adjustment, then yes. Taking Caló’s militant institutionality seriously, we need not abandon the outward edge of critique. However, we can supplement it with an inward practice of re-composition. At La Borde, the concept of ‘pathoplasty’, which refers to how mental illness is shaped in relation to the institutional and material environment (Caló 2019, 120), showed how small, repeated gestures rearranged what a clinic could be. At QUEERCIRCLE, the equivalent is malleability, a slow ecology of relations that privileges contingency over control, with the result being not a weak or uncertain form but a responsive one.
View the full QUEERCIRCLE takeover
About the author
Phoebe Eustance is an artist-researcher. Their work engages audio-visual practices, intertwining queer studies and spatial politics within the context of the clinic. Phoebe is studying for a practice-led PhD at Birmingham School of Art titled, ‘The hospital is ill: material encounters and orientations in locked psychiatric spaces.’ They completed an MA (2016) at the Centre for Research Architecture, Goldsmiths and a BA (2013) in Fine Art at Leeds University.
References
Belmar, Elodie. 2025. Every Little Thing: Institutional Psychotherapy and the La Borde Clinic. Conversation event, Goldsmiths, University of London. https://www.gold.ac.uk/calendar/?id=15433. Accessed 16 Sept 2025.
Caló, Susana. 2019. ‘Can an Institution Be Militant?’. In Metabolic Rifts. A Reader, edited by PROSPECTIONS for Art, Education and Knowledge Production. Atlas Projectos.
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. 2003. Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. Duke University Press.
