Art projects here are conceived as events rather than objects, precarious architectures of time that activate relation, vulnerability, and collective presence. Each work unfolds as a situational experiment: half ritual, half provocation, operating at the edge between sculpture, performance, and environment. Materials—whether soil, fruit, textiles, plastic bags, or concrete—are not chosen for permanence but for their capacity to decay, transform, and implicate the body of the viewer. The works resist commodification and instead rehearse affection, instability, and encounter. A house filled with earth becomes a temporary dwelling for intimacy and isolation; a red bag or a yellow briefcase wanders the city as a situational fixer; ritual actions unfold in water, fields, and plazas where the line between art and life collapses. These projects insist on fragility not as weakness but as method: ephemerality becomes political, proposing forms of art that live only through participation, memory, and transformation. Art projects often emerge from collaboration and improvisation, entangling dancers, musicians, and passersby into the field of work. The city itself frequently becomes the final installation, with streets, bars, and plazas transformed into relational devices. The logic of the studio dissolves, replaced by a dispersed laboratory where each project is simultaneously documentation, performance, and conceptual essay. In their diversity—rituals of food, subtractive cuts in furniture, temporary shelters, chromatic landscapes—the projects maintain a constant concern: to test how art can alter the metabolism of daily life, how it can puncture the ordinary with a gesture of strangeness, tenderness, or resistance. They perform critique not through distance but through embodied action, demanding that spectators also become participants in the unfolding of meaning. What emerges is an art that is never complete, always in flux, marked by the rhythms of context and relation. It proposes the artwork not as finished entity but as unstable catalyst of transformation, situated in the fragile territory where collective imagination takes form.
martes, 26 de agosto de 2025
lunes, 17 de marzo de 2025
Re-(t)exHile * Site Specific Tension
The textile canopy, suspended between monumental equestrian sculptures and industrial concrete, embodies both shelter and rupture, generating a space of contingent collectivity amidst urban residues.
Central to the project is the reuse of second-hand textiles, sourced from Katangua Market, one of Africa’s largest hubs for the circulation of discarded garments from the Global North. Purchased in bulk bags from the lowest-priced section, the fabrics—subjected to resistance testing—bear the wear of global consumption and the imprint of economic asymmetries. Their transformation into a resilient canopy challenges normative notions of material obsolescence, embedding within the structure a tangible critique of circular economies. While discourses around sustainability often celebrate reuse, Re-(t)exHile underscores the paradoxical violence of material dumping, where “recycling” veils extractive trade practices. The project aligns with Ibrahim Mahama’s jute installations and El Anatsui’s reconstituted bottle-top tapestries, yet departs in its deliberate impermanence, crafting a temporal occupation that resists commodification. The red line becomes a symbol of marginality, invisibilized yet persistent, evoking questions of exclusion, mobility, and visibility in urban and artistic domains. Its in-betweenness redefines the installation as a space of latency, where meaning flickers between presence and absence, structure and cloth, power and fragility. Set against the monumental backdrop of Tafawa Balewa Square’s equestrian figures and rigid architectural geometries, Re-(t)exHile intervenes with softness, adaptability, and symbolic tension.The tensile structure, suspended by three stainless steel cables and securely anchored to the concrete ground, creates spatial dynamism through subtle shifts in height, movement, and light. This ephemeral spatiality contrasts with the square’s permanence and symmetry, recalling Gordon Matta-Clark’s acts of architectural incision, and Do Ho Suh’s fabric architectures that transpose domesticity into public space. As with the 2016 Venice Biennale’s “Reporting from the Front”, which emphasized architecture as social action, this work challenges the authoritative monumentality of the plaza, transforming it into a contested zone of dialogue and occupation. The project’s transdisciplinary approach—merging architectural design, textile knowledge, and performance—reflects a collaborative ethos resonant with the Sharjah Biennial’s emphasis on artistic networks and spatial justice. Beyond its physical form, Re-(t)exHile operates as a platform for collaborative acts, a refuge not only from environmental elements but from dominant narratives of space and belonging. The act of constructing together becomes a political gesture, emphasizing process over product, relation over object. In Re-(t)exHile, the ephemeral canopy is more than an architectural intervention; it is a spatial manifesto against exclusion, waste, and fixity. By embedding hidden messages, engaging with precarious materials, and occupying a charged urban site, the work enacts a critique of global material flows while crafting a space of temporary resistance and care. It challenges us to rethink what architecture can do—to shelter, to question, to reveal—and how artistic interventions might disrupt and reimagine the narratives inscribed in public space.
Re-(t)exHile – Refuge 2024, presented at the IV Lagos Biennial of Art and Architecture, was an intersection of ephemeral architecture, urban memory, and material circulation that converges into a powerful spatial critique. Conceived by a transdisciplinary team of artists, architects, and cultural practitioners including Lloveras, Bobrikova, Carmen, Gatti and Badmus.
sábado, 5 de octubre de 2024
A Transdisciplinary Practice Spanning Art, Architecture, and Conceptual Research
Anto Lloveras is a Transdisciplinary artist, architect, and researcher who has developed an extensive body of work that spans over 300 projects across multiple fields, including conceptual art, architecture, performance, and urbanism. His practice, marked by a blend of critical inquiry and experimental methodologies, explores the intersections of space, identity, and social dynamics. From ephemeral installations to urban interventions, his approach integrates diverse mediums and disciplines, creating a dynamic framework that bridges theory and practice. Lloveras's projects, developed in cities like Madrid, Mexico City and Lagos, engage deeply with local contexts, using art as a tool for reimagining spaces and fostering new dialogues around presence and transformation.
Relational Art and Architecture
Each discipline interweaves with its context, generating dynamic encounters that challenge permanence and perception. In architecture, projects like the Trole Building transform industrial structures into adaptable workspaces that dialogue with their surroundings. In the field of installation art, series such as YELLOW BAG use a simple everyday object to mark transitions and presence across urban settings like Madrid and Lagos. From the perspective of science and technology, projects like Psicología Ambiental Hoy delve into human interaction with space through perception and memory, analyzing how environments shape behavior. In conceptual art, SOCIOPLASTICS acts as a framework merging physical and relational elements, emphasizing collaborative processes. In film, the COPOS comprises over 500 videos documenting urban interventions, exploring the idea of an unstable archive. For performance, works like DOBLE CARA investigate duality and perception through choreographic movements and installations.
Projects are often situated at the intersection of urban space and social dynamics, using subtle interventions to shift perceptions. Works like Spanish Bar capture the fading essence of traditional community hubs, transforming familiar locations into contexts for reflection on cultural shifts. In the ongoing series TWINS, the city becomes a fragmented reality of mirrored elements and contrasts, creating a dialogue between symmetry and rupture across urban landscapes. The textile-based project Re(T)exHile, presented at the IV Lagos Biennial, explores sustainability and memory through fabric, addressing the dualities of preservation and transformation. In Conversation Installation, ephemeral dialogues become the core medium, turning the spoken word into an art form that evolves with each participant’s input, challenging the traditional stability of exhibitions.
Materiality and Absence
Many projects focus on material transformation and the poetics of absence. The Subtraction Series involves precise cuts and removals from natural landscapes, revealing the fragility of human intervention and the resilience of the environment. With MUDAS, ephemeral sculptures created from fresh banana leaves slowly decay over time, symbolizing cycles of change and cultural identity. In the collaborative and site-specific Restoran Splendid, the idea of rotating authorship dissolves the hierarchy between artists, creating a visual dialogue on equality and presence. Similarly, The Light in Cádiz is a meditative exploration of form and color, using minimal interventions to alter the perception of coastal landscapes and urban boundaries. Artistic expressions often delve into the tension between form and formlessness. In the KINGDOM SERIES, temporary landscape interventions subtly alter natural surroundings to explore the fragility of ecosystems and the transient impact of human presence. The MEAT SERIES uses precise cuts in everyday objects, such as sofas and chairs, to transform them into sculptural forms that evoke themes of fragmentation and restoration. The drawing project KING DREAM consists of raw, unfinished forms that embrace imperfection, capturing primal emotions through a continuous line, as part of the ongoing STONE GARDEN series.
Lapieza Relational Agency emerged in Madrid in 2009 as a response to the need for alternative artistic platforms outside traditional gallery circuits. Founded by Anto Lloveras, it initially took the form of a fluid exhibition space, focusing on creating ‘unstable installations’ that combined urban interventions, architecture, and ephemeral actions. Early projects such as EXIT and SUPERMARKET set the tone for a practice centered on questioning the boundaries between space, body, and context. As a collaborative endeavor, Lapieza established itself as a forum for artists, architects, and researchers to experiment with new forms of expression, exploring the tension between permanence and transformation in art.
Over time, Lapieza evolved from a physical gallery to a Relational Agency that traverses different geographies and disciplines, expanding its focus to include large-scale interventions and research-based projects. The concept of Socioplastics —a term coined to define its dynamic approach to blending material, social, and symbolic elements—became a guiding principle. Series like TWINS, FRESH MUSEUM, and COSMOTIDIANO reimagined conventional exhibition formats, using public spaces in cities like Madrid, Lagos, and Mexico City as shifting canvases for collective narratives. These projects transformed the agency into a site of ongoing experimentation, where Lloveras’s own work often intersected with the broader context, contributing to a shared language of spatial disruption and relational aesthetics.
