jueves, 4 de septiembre de 2025

FLAKES | COPOS: _______ A Keystone in Socioplastics


FLAKES —or COPOS in Spanish— is not merely a video series but a keystone within the broader socioplastic methodology, crystallizing multiple layers of well-being, memory, reality, and documentary form into a continuous practice of urban inscription. Rooted in the principle that the city is a living conservatory, FLAKES treats everyday gestures—walking, waiting, listening, drifting—not as marginal events but as central sculptural acts within a distributed aesthetic field. Each numbered entry, often tied to a location (Mexico City, Madrid, Marseille, London), operates simultaneously as cinematic fragment and ethnographic trace, transforming urban flux into a malleable medium for reflection, resistance, and poetic observation. The significance of FLAKES lies in its temporal accumulation: over 600 entries since 2008 form not a documentary archive in the conventional sense, but a situational cosmology, where each episode acts as a living pixel in the construction of urban memory. This methodology does not seek monumental representation, but rather a micro-political attention to the ephemeral, where street food (COPOS 436), public registration (COPOS 439), or wedding aesthetics (COPOS 443) become scenes of social plasticity. The act of filming, much like editing or walking, becomes a form of ritual materiality—a way of producing care and significance through repetition and context. Through this, FLAKES enacts Lefebvre’s Right to the City, turning urban rights into lived, documented experiences. Its layers—filmic, poetic, political—reveal the city not as fixed infrastructure, but as cinematic matter, edited through movement, memory, and relation. As a keystone, FLAKES holds together the theoretical and the tactile dimensions of socioplastics, sustaining an ecology where artistic attention itself becomes a form of life-making.

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=COPOS+TOMOTO+LAPIEZA

https://antolloveras.blogspot.com/2024/10/copos.html


Nowadays



MY work consists of active series spanning urbanism, art, science, and humanities, exploring liminal spaces and creating sensitivity layers through the accumulation of experiences. 

Each discipline interweaves with its context, generating dynamic encounters that challenge permanence and perception. In architecture, projects like the Trole Building in Madrid stand out for transforming 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 film, the COPOS series 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. Finally, in the humanities, CAPA (Council of Applied Art and Philosophy) integrates theory and practice, proposing new hermeneutic frameworks to redefine authorship and cultural production.

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.

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.


Other projects explore the fluid dynamics of space and narrative. STRUCTURAL CONVERSATIONS engages with architecture and language, inviting audiences to reflect on how structures—both physical and social—shape human interaction. The FRAMED BENDED SERIES pushes metal into organic shapes, capturing a process of continuous transformation. THE ROAD TO RESTORATION documents cultural sites and their conservation, exploring how the past informs future narratives. Thermodynamic Essays explore the interplay between elemental forces—water, stone, and fire—creating poetic interactions that reveal nature’s hidden dynamism.


Across these projects, the aim is to use art as a lens for rethinking presence, identity, and transformation. Each piece—whether through sculpture, performance, film, or architecture—becomes a tool for examining the boundaries between permanence and impermanence, creating a dialogue between context, action, and memory.



COPOS ___ ART SERIES 158 __ 2024 LAPIEZA 1835 +


The works reflect a dispersed chromatic landscape, where each piece—whether video or installation—contributes to a serialized, open-ended dialogue of color, form, and space.  

Copos is not merely a documentation of cities but an ongoing experimentation with the textures and chromatic densities of urban life.  




 

COPOS 578 (1:01) 
COPOS 577 LUGO TP7 (1:05)
COPOS 576 GUIMARAES (1:01) 
COPOS 575 WHOSE BACK (1:03) 
COPOS 574 SO EASY (1:01) 
COPOS 573 SANTANDER (1:39) 
COPOS 572 DES SAUVAGES (1:02) 
COPOS 571 CIRCULAR (1:02) 
COPOS 570 TROUBLE (1:06) 
COPOS 569 TÁNGER (1:01) 
COPOS 568 SALIDA DE CAMIONES (0:59) 
COPOS 567 DIRT ON THE GROUND (1:04)


LAPIEZA RELATIONAL SERIES 158 DIRT ON THE GROUND
1824, 1825, 1826, 
1827, 1828, 1829, 
1830, 1831, 1832, 
1833, 1834, 1835.

Urbanas





Constructionism, Postmodernism, and the Strategic Role of Evaluation


Evaluation, often perceived as a neutral, technical process, is in fact a politically charged and socially constructed practice that shapes the very realities it aims to assess. Rooted in the rationalist tradition of diagnosis, planning, and impact analysis, evaluation has long been deployed as a managerial tool aligned with positivist assumptions. However, Fernández-Ramírez repositions it within a postmodern and constructionist framework, emphasizing its reifying power: the capacity of evaluation criteria to define what counts as valuable, desirable, or even real within organizations. The evaluative act thus becomes inherently strategic, not only measuring performance but also reinforcing or challenging dominant interests. From this perspective, indicators are not neutral reflections of preexisting qualities—they are constructs that delimit organizational behavior, often solidifying hegemonic norms under the guise of objectivity. By proposing a shift from improvement and accountability toward strategic legitimation, Fernández-Ramírez advocates a critical rethinking of evaluation as a tool for democratic negotiation and institutional transformation. The evaluator's role is no longer that of a distant technician but of a facilitator mediating between competing stakeholder visions. In recognizing the inherently normative nature of evaluative criteria, this approach highlights the ethical responsibility of evaluators to make explicit the political implications of their work and to actively support collective aspirations for change. Ultimately, evaluation becomes a site of struggle over meaning, direction, and power—capable of shaping futures rather than merely describing pasts.


Fernández-Ramírez, B. (2009) Construccionismo, postmodernismo y teoría de la evaluación. La función estratégica de la evaluación, Athenea Digital, 15, pp. 119–134.

Thursday





 

Bags and Other Portable Sculptures Across Continents, Contexts, and Years (2010–2025)




The persistent fascination with the bag projects—Blue, Yellow, Green Briefcase, points to the peculiar charisma of the ordinary object when charged with conceptual force. These bags, fragile and functional, have travelled restlessly across South America and Asia—Mexico City, Oaxaca, Bogotá, Lagos, Taipei—where they act as mobile agents of critical pedagogy. They carry almost nothing yet hold everything: traces of encounters, residues of performances, whispers of urban instability. Each documented displacement confirms that their resonance lies not in sculptural weight but in translatability—anyone, anywhere, can recognise a bag. What changes is the context, the ritual, the precarious choreography it enables. In this way, the bags become both artwork and witness, quietly teaching that instability is not a deficit but a shared global condition. What the readership confirms is that these portable sculptures are more than anecdotes. They form a living archive where seriality replaces monumentality, where repetition builds a transnational narrative of fragility and persistence. From South American plazas to Asian port cities, audiences reencounter themselves through this unstable mirror: the humble plastic fold elevated into a site of reflection on mobility, waste, memory, and survival. Their thousands of clicks, distributed across geographies, do not celebrate popularity but indicate a collective will to participate in art that is porous and itinerant. To follow the bags is to embrace a pedagogy of the unstable, a practice that demonstrates how even the smallest object, endlessly re-situated, can redraw the cartography of contemporary conceptualism.

Happiness without Fetishes




The key idea: “happiness” is not a monolithic psychological state but a constellation of co-equal domains whose balance enables full and just lives. To reduce well-being to income, utility, or demand reveals more a methodological bias than a humanist understanding of development. Against this narrowing, the capability–functionings framework (Sen) and the architecture of Gross National Happiness (nine domains) reposition public policy in the arena where value truly takes shape: health, education, time, community, culture, governance, living standards, environment, and psychological well-being. Their strength is not utopian but pragmatic: to guide comparative decisions, eliminate suboptimal options, and maximise real freedoms to be and do what people value.This ecology of ends has a dual valence. Intrinsic: living without violence, learning with meaning, cultivating bonds and safeguarding the biosphere are valuable in themselves. Instrumental: domains mutually reinforce each other (e.g., quality education improves health, civic agency, and productivity; vibrant communities reduce conflict and transaction costs). The programmatic consequence is clear: composite metrics and public deliberation must govern — not “correlates” of self-reported satisfaction, easily manipulated or blind to unequal conversion of resources into capabilities. Success, not utopia, demands “joined-up” policies: values in curricula, school-based mindfulness, infrastructures of care, social time, and environmental custodianship, all assessed by cost-effectiveness and their impact on substantive freedoms. The outcome is not another index replacing judgement, but a framework to civilise the economy, reconciling prosperity with dignity and ecological limits. 



LACALLE * A Right-to-the-City Device



LACALLE is a performative-urban project initiated in 2010 by Anto Lloveras under the experimental label TOMOTO FILMS, emerging from an urgent artistic and political intuition: to return poetic action to the street as a form of civic presence, affective protest, and spatial listening. Rooted in the collaborative matrix of Maite Dono (voice)Hectruso (MiniRoc system) and El Intruso (live sound), LACALLE unfolds as a series of mobile performances across different Spanish cities—Ferrol, Madrid, Gijón, Sevilla, Almería—where the act of walking, sounding, and speaking becomes a situated reappropriation of public space. The MiniRoc, a wearable sound apparatus carried like a backpack, is more than a tool—it's an expressive prosthesis that turns the performer into a walking amplifier, a poetic antenna. Each episode—filmed and archived by Tomoto—transforms overlooked urban environments into sites of encounter and disruption: from whispering to a market wall to amplifying voice in a salt mine or a decaying square, these gestures are minimal yet deeply charged, forming a poetics of the infrastructural. LACALLE doesn't merely use the city—it talks back to it, revealing its textures, wounds, and latent memories through sound and speech. Influenced by psychogeography, performance art, and street poetry, it positions poetry as politics, where the right to express, to sound, to linger, and to modify perception becomes an act of resistance. As a conceptual framework and open series, LACALLE proposes a method: listening as action, dérive as authorship, and the voice as a tactical claim to the urban commons.







AMARES - SILENCIO - MAITE DONO

Urbanas








Urbanas







 

MINIROC * Evolution of Sound from COPOS to Urban Amplification



MiniRoc emerges as a direct evolution of the sonic needs of COPOS, the expansive video-performance series initiated by Anto Lloveras and developed under TOMOTO Films, with the creative complicity of Hectruso (Héctor Crehuet) and the live sound of El Intruso. Born from the necessity to capture real sound in uncontrolled urban environments, MiniRoc was designed as a portable amplification-recording system—a hybrid machine that blends speaker, microphone, and body into a single mobile interface. During the early COPOS episodes—from Madrid to London, Marseille to Mexico City (2010–2013)—the need for a more integrated, embodied sound tool became urgent, especially when performing in chaotic, noisy streets or delicate acoustic zones where the voice needed presence without overpowering the space. MiniRoc answered this by turning the performer into a moving node of sonic activation, allowing speech, music, and ambient noise to coexist, collide, and feedback in live time. More than a technical tool, MiniRoc became an aesthetic pivot between the intimate gesture of COPOS and the full-bodied dérive of LACALLE, where it evolved from a functional solution to a poetic prosthesis—an active agent of listening, disruption, and amplification. Built collaboratively by Hectruso through trial, error, and field experimentation, its design is both minimal and raw, adapting to different geographies and performative intensities. MiniRoc is not simply carried—it is inhabited, becoming an extension of the artist’s voice and a tactical medium to inscribe sound into the street. From “COPOS 436 GORDITAS AHOGADAS” to “COPOS 443 ESTILO NUPCIAL”, MiniRoc quietly transformed videoperformance into a shared acoustic space, where the city listens back.https://www.medialab-matadero.es/personal/hectruso-y-tomoto


From Urban Squads to Qualitatskontrolle: Engaging with Collective Actions, Open Series, and the Social Grammar of Contemporary Art (2015–2025)



Parallel to the global drift of the bags, another cluster of entries—Urban Squad, The Road to Restoration, Qualitatskontrolle—has accumulated thousands of visits, reflecting a different kind of magnetism: the attraction of the collective process. These projects unfolded primarily in Europe—Cádiz, Amsterdam, Madrid, Uddebo—where the social grammar of performance and installation thrives on collaboration. Here, the reader encounters not an object but a stage of negotiation: between musicians and architects, between salt sacks and scaffolding, between public squares and precarious infrastructures. The strong readership suggests that audiences respond to art not only as product but as laboratory, a rehearsal space where co-presence is more important than finished form. In this European constellation, the emphasis is on the open-ended: squads, series, controls, each refusing closure and inviting continuous return. That thousands of readers from elsewhere—Latin America, Asia, North Africa—gravitate to these accounts reveals a broader hunger for the collective imagination. What began in European theatres, warehouses, or biennials has reverberated, amplified by the networked logic of the archive. The popularity of these entries suggests that collectives today are not simply groups of artists but formats of reception: audiences visit them as if joining the rehearsal, becoming implicated in the process. In this sense, the readership itself forms part of the work, a dispersed yet attentive body that sustains the life of projects long after the event. To follow the series is to acknowledge that art survives not in permanence but in the unstable memory of actions—thousands of readers becoming, in their own way, a temporary collective.


miércoles, 3 de septiembre de 2025

The Didactics of Landscape


Landscape photography, when approached as a rephotographic practice, transcends its aesthetic role to become a method of inquiry into territorial transformation and collective memory. In Recollecting Landscapes, Notteboom (2011) examines a century-spanning visual archive of sixty Belgian sites, photographed across three periods (1904, 1980, and 2004), offering a nuanced methodology for understanding spatial and sociocultural evolution. Instead of focusing merely on the scenes captured, the article dissects how the presentation of images shapes interpretation, highlighting the didactic potential inherent in curated photographic sequences. This shifts attention to the semiotics of framing, sequencing, and juxtaposition, where the temporal tension between views becomes a site for reflection. Notteboom argues that such structured visual experiences act as tools for architectural education, prompting students to read landscapes not just as compositions but as palimpsests of layered interventions. Case in point, a formerly pastoral site transformed into a peri-urban enclave illustrates the subtle negotiations between preservation and progression, inviting analysis beyond surface aesthetics. Ultimately, this piece advocates for photography as a form of critical pedagogy, one that cultivates spatial literacy and stimulates interpretive thinking about place-making and transformation.




Notteboom, B., 2011. Recollecting Landscapes: landscape photography as a didactic toolArchitectural Research Quarterly, 15(1), pp.47–55. doi:10.1017/S1359135511000352.


Urbanas

 









 

Wednesday





A Seasonal Simulacrum


Along the Mediterranean coast of Spain, what’s taking shape isn’t urban development in any traditional or meaningful sense—it is a metastasis, a spreading malignancy of architectural form that mimics the density of real cities while utterly lacking their depth. These aren't towns evolving or cities expanding organically; they are speculative shells, pumped full of concrete and debt, then abandoned to seasonal vacancy. Built environments without real environments, designed not for life but for extraction. They emerge rapidly, flourish briefly under the glare of summer tourism, then fall silent—empty balconies, shuttered windows, drained pools, and ghost streets. This isn’t tourism anymore—it’s urban thrombosis, where the accumulation of matter—glass, steel, asphalt—clots the natural and social arteries of the land. Circulation is blocked: not only of bodies, but of meaning, tradition, memory, and routine. What should be a city becomes a platform for absentee ownership, where houses are booked like hotel rooms, and the very notion of home is liquified into pure transaction. The city becomes not a place to dwell, but a mechanism to generate yield. And the consequences are devastating: schools close because there are no children, buses vanish because there are no commuters, hospitals downsize because care is not needed by the hour. Life is no longer continuous but fragmented, broken by the artificial pulse of high season. What’s left behind is a simulacrum of urbanism—plenty of infrastructure but no intimacy, façades but no face-to-face. The illusion of vitality masks a profound stillness, a hollowing out of the civic. A true city sustains stories, rituals, intergenerational bonds. Here, instead, we find voids dressed as vitality, neighborhoods built to remain strangers. This is not just an architectural or economic failure—it is a political wound and a cultural rupture, a sign that we’ve traded belonging for profitability, permanence for flexibility, and presence for throughput. To address this crisis requires more than new regulations or better design—it requires a radical ethics of inhabitation, a philosophy of duration and rootedness in a time obsessed with mobility, liquidity, and endless turnover. Only by reclaiming the right to dwell—not merely to occupy—can we begin to restore meaning to the urban fabric and repair what speculative urbanism has systematically erased.

Urbanas







 

martes, 2 de septiembre de 2025

A critical model of serial production grounded in process, site, and relation





The trajectory of Anto Lloveras, establishes a distinctive artistic methodology rooted in seriality as method and repetition as conceptual validation, having generated over 500 autonomous yet interconnected ideas ranging from buildings, interiors, objects and ephemeral installations to furniture, exhibitions, graphic works, performances, lectures, and video pieces; rejecting monumentality in favour of a situational, relational and process-based condition, Lloveras constructs a body of work that resists closure and embraces drift, treating each project as an open module within a distributed ecosystem of series; these series—Socioplastics, Unstable Installation Series, Subtraction Series, COPOS, Kingdom, and Relational Batches, among others—operate as conceptual archipelagos with their own internal logic, yet remain porous to reactivation, displacement and mutation, always responding to the specificity of site, temporality and social context; far from composing a taxonomic inventory, this accumulation of serial entries forms a living matrix, in which ideas are tested, reiterated, withdrawn or repurposed, leaving a mobile yet persistent imprint across an expanded archive of relational practice; from early urban actions to recent investigations into spatial pedagogy, climate justice and affective residues, Lloveras has sustained a critical methodology that eschews authorship as fetish, prioritising instead the assemblage of conditions, the intensive activation of archival material, and the construction of relationships as form, where ephemerality becomes not a symptom of scarcity, but a deliberate aesthetic and political strategy.


The Normative Fabric of Mind



The accelerating integration of neurotechnologies into therapeutic, wellness, and even recreational contexts introduces a profound reconfiguration of how the mind–brain relation is understood and normatively governed, particularly as the material substrate of consciousness becomes increasingly accessible to technological intervention (Vega-Encabo et al., 2025); the workshop Minding the Rights and Fabric of Mind, held at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid on 8–9 September 2025, foregrounds this shift by convening an interdisciplinary cohort of scholars to address the ontological, ethical, and legal implications of emerging neurotechnological capabilities; key contributions include Bublitz’s (2025) analysis of the metaphysical underpinnings of neurorights, Ligthart’s (2025) critical reassessment of the supposed absoluteness of cognitive liberty, and Ienca’s (2025) exploration of mental privacy in an era where the boundaries of thought may no longer be inviolable; most notably, Aniballi (2025) presents a legal-ontological framework for recognising personal identity as central to the articulation of neurorights, while Cassinadri (2025) proposes a philosophical reconstruction of the right to self-integrity in technologically mediated conditions of agency; in this light, the event offers a unique platform to reconsider the ethical infrastructure surrounding cognitive autonomy, identity, and responsibility, not merely as contingent legal protections but as foundational dimensions of personhood requiring conceptual redefinition in the digital age; thus, the workshop exemplifies how legal and ethical reflection must evolve in tandem with neurotechnological innovation, lest the fabric of the mind be reconfigured without due normative deliberation (Bonicalzi et al., 2025).

Streaming Egos ***** The Web-Uterus and the Corporeal Disobedience of Digital Identity ___ DÜSSELDORF 160116 DIGITAL IDENTITY CONVENTION


Streaming Egos at the NRW-Forum Düsseldorf, curated by Mateo Feijoo with the support of the Goethe-Institut, radically reframed the notion of digital identity by rooting it in the corporeal, affective, and collective. Central to the Spanish contribution was the “body bubble,” an inflatable translucent structure that acted as both metaphor and medium: a web-uterus, fragile and responsive, which deflated when its vaginal entrance was held open, allegorising the vulnerability of communal digital spaces. Within this permeable enclosure, diverse artistic gestures—Sonia Gómez’s intuitive live writing, Monoperro’s erotic cave-like drawings, Tomoto’s simultaneous editing and streaming, and Dr. Kurogo’s off-site sound loops—wove a layered post-digital happening, where analogue and virtual blurred into one continuous, unstable field. The event did not seek resolution but activated a situational essay, a space where identity could be explored not as fixed or datafied, but as fleshy, rhythmic, and mutable. The work resisted the fetishisation of digital media, instead enacting a ritual of presence, echoing Cramer’s claim that the post-digital is less about technological novelty and more about inhabiting its messy aftermath. Streaming Egos thus became a choreography of interdependence, refusing singular authorship or stable meaning. It asked not “who are we online?” but “how do we breathe together through the screen?”—inviting a critical reimagining of the digital self as haunted, plural, and porous.






Divola


lunes, 1 de septiembre de 2025

COPOS

 

COPOS | FLAKES - ENSAYOS POSICIONALES - MADRID - LONDON - MEXICO CITY - MARSEILLE


COPOS - MEXICO DF - 2013 


COPOS 435 LUCHA PANIFICADORA

COPOS 436 GORDITAS AHOGADAS 
COPOS 437 LIMOSNEROS FRU FRU

COPOS 438 A TODA LUZ 

COPOS 439 REGISTRO PÚBLICO
COPOS 440 CHURROS RELLENOS
COPOS 441 EL NUEVO MUNDO 
COPOS 442 JUGUETES Y GLOBOS | MEXICO DF 2013 
COPOS 443 | ESTILO NUPCIAL | MEXICO DF 2013

COPOS 444 FIESTAMERICANA | MEXICO DF 2013

ART BY TOMOTO
DERIVA VIDEOPERFORMATIVA URBANA
CIUDAD DE MEXICO
FEBRERO 2013

COPOS - MADRID - 2009

COPOS 342 DIVISA FLORES | MUSIC EL INTRUSO
COPOS 364 CIRROS MARIANO | MUSIC VICTOR TRONIC
COPOS 372 CUERO | MUSIC EL INTRUSO
DERIVA VIDEOPERFORMATIVA URBANA
SERIE ABIERTA