Collective work here is not a supplement to individual practice—it is a medium in itself, a fragile organism where authorship dissolves into exchange. To work collectively means to accept risk, antagonism, generosity, and the instability of voices overlapping. These groups are not permanent institutions but temporary laboratories, born from urgency and often dissolving once their resonance has been exhausted. What remains are traces: installations, documents, rituals, and above all, the memory of acting together. LAPIEZA functioned as a gallery without walls, a container for weekly “mutations” in which artists intervened live, in real time. Soil filled rooms, bodies became architecture, objects transformed under collective authorship. The emphasis was not on display but on process: the gallery as social sculpture, open to contingency. PLANCTON, in contrast, was conceived as a one-year experimental collective—an unstable “catalyst squad” that mixed action, theory, and performance, questioning the boundaries between personal and shared authorship before dissolving deliberately. CAPA, the Political Council for Agonistic Practices, sought to rethink collectivity itself as a field of conflict and strategy: a rotating network of thinkers, artists, and theorists producing micro-essays and interventions rather than fixed works. In each case, the collective becomes both method and artwork. To sit in conversation, to share a ritual meal, to build an installation together, or to burn a totem in a rural field—all these acts operate as forms of sculpture, choreography, pedagogy, and resistance. The collective moment is not an illustration of togetherness but the performance of it, with all its tensions, failures, and unpredictable energies. These experiments propose collectivity not as consensus but as a way to inhabit difference: to allow dissonance, plurality, and conflict to become productive material. In doing so, they push against the art world’s obsession with individual authorship, opening instead to shared processes that are unstable, porous, and ultimately more alive.
