Broth as Ontology and Medium * Ritual, Matter, and the Politics of Origin (Lloveras, 2020)

Broth Ritual (2020) unfolds as a speculative meditation on origin, matter, and becoming, positioning itself between cinematic abstraction, performative gesture, and ontological inquiry. The work proposes broth not merely as metaphor but as medium: a primordial substance through which life, memory, and sociality are rehearsed. Suspended particles and incandescent light construct a visual field that resists stable figuration, evoking instead a condition of emergence. What is shown is not an image of origin but an operative simulation of it. Visibility remains provisional, as if the world itself were still deciding how to appear. This instability recalls early cosmological imaginaries while aligning with experimental film traditions that privilege perception over representation. Yet Broth Ritual departs from purely optical investigation by anchoring its visual language in a corporeal, almost nutritional logic. Cinema here behaves like matter in suspension: thick, warm, and unresolved. The ritual dimension is crucial. Rather than narrating myth, the work enacts a mythic condition through repetition, slowness, and immersion. In doing so, it reframes ritual as a contemporary epistemic tool—an aesthetic strategy capable of reactivating archaic knowledge without nostalgia. The viewer is not invited to interpret but to inhabit a state of pre-formal awareness, where matter, light, and body are still coalescing.

At the core of Broth Ritual lies a reconfiguration of cooking and consumption as cosmological acts. The broth functions as a shared fluid architecture, dissolving distinctions between interior and exterior, self and environment. Steam becomes atmosphere; light becomes heat; particles become proto-organisms. This synesthetic convergence situates the work within a broader discourse on material ecologies and post-human embodiment. The act of preparing and ingesting broth is stripped of domestic banality and elevated to a performative threshold where care, survival, and collectivity intersect. Importantly, the work does not aestheticise poverty or subsistence; rather, it insists on the ethical density of nourishment as a social bond. The broth is not symbolic food but a carrier of relational energy. In this sense, Broth Ritual aligns with practices that understand matter as active and responsive, echoing new materialist philosophies without illustrating them. The body becomes porous, temporarily indistinct from its milieu. Such dissolution challenges the modern fantasy of autonomy, proposing instead a politics of interdependence grounded in shared vulnerability. The ritual does not resolve into transcendence; it remains immanent, grounded in heat, liquid, and breath.

Formally, the work negotiates a delicate balance between cinematic abstraction and performative presence. Light behaves less as illumination than as force—pulsating, unstable, and generative. The floating particulates oscillate between scales: they read simultaneously as cosmic dust, planktonic life, and cellular matter. This collapse of scale destabilises anthropocentric perception, situating the human body as one modulation within a broader continuum of matter. Time, too, becomes viscous. The pacing resists narrative progression, favouring duration and repetition. Such temporal thickness reinforces the ritualistic structure, allowing meaning to sediment rather than unfold. The absence of explicit commentary intensifies the work’s speculative charge. Viewers are compelled to confront their own thresholds of perception and patience. In this respect, Broth Ritual functions as a critique of accelerated visual culture, offering instead a slow epistemology rooted in sensation. The work’s aesthetic economy is rigorous: nothing is excessive, yet everything feels saturated. This restraint underscores the seriousness of its inquiry, positioning the piece not as spectacle but as a site of contemplation where form and matter remain in productive tension.

Within the broader framework of Socioplastics, Broth Ritual can be read as an attempt to sculpt social relations through elemental processes. The work proposes that social form, like biological life, emerges from shared conditions rather than imposed structures. Broth becomes a model for collective existence: heterogeneous, mutable, and sustained through care. This proposition carries implicit political weight. Against regimes of separation, extraction, and abstraction, the work insists on proximity, maintenance, and warmth. Its radicality lies in its modesty. By returning to a minimal gesture—boiling, sharing, breathing—it articulates a counter-image to technocratic futures and disembodied networks. The ritual does not offer solutions; it offers conditions. It suggests that any viable social imagination must begin with the management of matter, energy, and affect at the most basic level. In this way, Broth Ritual operates as both artwork and proposition: a speculative rehearsal for forms of life yet to be stabilised. Its strength resides in its refusal to conclude, leaving the viewer suspended within an ongoing process of becoming.

Broth Ritual is a sensory descent into the origins of collective matter. This performance treats the act of preparing and consuming broth not as a domestic task, but as a "primordial fluid exchange." The rising steam, the incandescent light, and the floating organic particles create a dense, humid atmosphere that mirrors the "lodazal" of creation. In this ritual, the boundary between the body and the environment dissolves into a warm, shared soup—a liquid architecture of affection and survival that precedes all formal construction. It is the aesthetics of the simmer, where time is measured by the extraction of essence.

Broth Ritual is a daily performance of biological and emotional extraction, practiced within the RECREO spaceship during 2021 and 2022. Each morning, in a space devoid of a kitchen, Lloveras performed a ritual of "purity and density," boiling a single liter of water infused with potent herbs from a local apothecary. This was not a meal, but a "socioplastic potion"—the only sustenance consumed until noon—marking a state of physical and mental alertness. The broth functioned as a "primordial fluid," a bridge between the raw organic matter of the earth and the internal architecture of the body. However, the ritual's true power lay in its "Cinematic Displacement." Before consuming the liquid, Lloveras recorded the incandescent movement of the boiling particles—a micro-film of creation and entropy—and transmitted these images to the woman he loved. This act transforms the broth into a medium of communication; the steam and the bubbling herbs become a visual language of affection and survival. It is "Cinema Verité" at its most visceral: the camera documents not just a soup, but the energy of a longing heart. Within the archive, Broth Ritual stands as the ultimate proof that "Affection is Fuel." The act of eating is inseparable from the act of filming and the act of loving. The "Broth" is a situational fixer that heals the void of the studio through the heat of the liquid and the digital link. It is a durational gesture where the biological necessity of food collapses into the poetic necessity of the link, creating an unstable social sculpture that exists between the throat, the screen, and the distant "other."

Lloveras, A., 2020. Broth ______Ritual 2020______Long Film Recreo. [online] Available at: https://antolloveras.blogspot.com/2020/11/broth-ritual-2020-recreo.html

Explore Further within the Socioplastic Network:

• Threads as Critical Infrastructure: https://antolloveras.blogspot.com/2026/01/threads-as-critical-infrastructure.html

• Ephemeral Rituals and the Supernatural Wall: https://antolloveras.blogspot.com/2026/01/ephemeral-rituals-and-supernatural-wall.html

• Spanish Bar: https://antolloveras.blogspot.com/2026/01/spanish-bar-fading-ritual-and-living.html