The photographic series Normal Pop Food unfolds as a conceptual collection of hospital ready-mades that transcend their utilitarian function to become visual emblems of dignity within Spain’s public healthcare system, an exploration in which the aesthetics of routine are elevated as a testimony to a structure that, far from spectacle, ensures nutrition, hygiene, and standardised care in contexts of vulnerability; each tray, meticulously arranged, with its injection-moulded compartments designed with near-surgical precision, displays a visual choreography of modest yet complete meals—legumes, proteins, fruits, bread—that fulfil both medical and symbolic purposes, acting as small altars of structured care, while the formal repetition across meals and chromatic standardisation underline the anonymous yet human character of the system, and at this point the author introduces the notion of socioplastic art, a term referencing the material conditions of objects and their power to embody social discourse through functional banality, echoing Duchampian legacy by turning the everyday into a critical platform; in one of the most striking images, a white label with the patient’s name sits beside a portion of steamed salmon and two clementines, revealing that even bureaucratic markers can carry traces of tenderness, for these meals nourish not only bodies but also narrate how the healthcare system materialises through specific and visible gestures, where institutional design is not the opposite of empathy but rather its functional medium, and thus Normal Pop Food becomes a sensory demonstration, a witness-object that transforms hospital logistics into a poetics of collective care.
