Urbanas

A Radical Proposal

The São Paulo Biennial, one of the world’s most historically significant and politically engaged contemporary art exhibitions, has once again asserted itself not simply as a showcase of visual creativity but as a platform for political imagination, poetic resistance and epistemic disruption, offering a bold redefinition of what an art biennial can and should be in an era of planetary crisis, social fragmentation and historical debt, as this latest edition—led by Cameroonian curator Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung—places at its centre the urgent question: “how can we live better together?”, not as an abstract utopia but as a deeply practical, aesthetic and ethical enquiry, foregrounding the excluded, the racialised, the colonised and the dispossessed as agents of world-making through aesthetic insurgencies and cultural memory, and structuring the exhibition around the theme of “humankind” in order to challenge the very assumptions behind universalist humanism, exposing how traditional conceptions of the human have historically served to exclude vast populations through racial, gendered and colonial logics, a critique materialised through installations, performances and site-specific works that speak from the margins of global narratives, including Indigenous cosmologies, diasporic visions, queer futurisms and decolonial eco-thinking, all coalescing in what Ndikung calls a “listening exhibition”, where dialogue replaces spectacle and poetry resists reduction, exemplified in the artificial garden by Precious Okoyomon, where plants, soil and light simulate a post-apocalyptic ecosystem of resilience and mourning, or in the clay wall built by Brazilian artist Jota Mombaça, which becomes a tactile archive of resistance and refusal, while elsewhere, French artist Laure Prouvost constructs a surreal greenhouse inhabited by cyborg flora, infected by bacteria and memory, a liminal zone between ruin and regeneration, where petals become tongues and broken glass blooms into seeds, collectively suggesting that art is not here to decorate the crisis, but to invent the language and tools through which survival, justice and joy might still be possible in the face of systemic collapse and political exhaustion.

Reassessing Wellbeing as a Policy Compass

 

Wellbeing, often proposed as a progressive alternative to purely economic indicators like GDP, reveals significant limitations when examined through the lens of empirical rigour and policy applicability; despite its appeal, its measurement lacks consistency, with time series data failing to show robust correlations with key socio-economic variables such as public expenditure, income growth, reduced working hours, or even life expectancy, and its use in political contexts risks oversimplifying complex trade-offs into emotionally charged narratives that lack analytical depth; foundational economic literature, including insights from Simon Kuznets and Paul Dolan, already highlight the difficulty of capturing human welfare through singular metrics, while hedonic adaptation theories, which argue that happiness quickly returns to a baseline after life changes, are challenged for underestimating the broader, often non-linear value of material and aspirational achievements; further, data from longitudinal studies on marriage point to strong associations between social stability and wellbeing, yet causal direction remains contested, raising concerns about policy interpretations; additionally, current wellbeing frameworks fail to address essential policy challenges such as intertemporal preference allocation and the valuation of trade-offs across populations and time, both crucial for coherent decision-making in areas like health, education, and environmental policy; rather than offering clarity, wellbeing risks becoming a vague policy placeholder, vulnerable to politicisation and detached from concrete outcomes, suggesting that its role in governance requires cautious restraint, methodological refinement, and far greater conceptual precision before it can inform policy with the authority often claimed on its behalf.

Urbanas

 

Tensión armónica

La arquitectura contemporánea tiene en ocasiones la capacidad de actuar como contrapunto, injerto o glosa de lo histórico, y pocos ejemplos lo ilustran con tanta claridad como esta intervención blanca y ondulante adosada al cuerpo robusto de una catedral neogótica, donde el vidrio y el acero esculpen una presencia ligera y casi flotante que no pretende camuflarse ni competir con la piedra tallada, sino establecer una tensión armónica entre dos lógicas constructivas radicalmente distintas: la gravedad frente a la levedad, la verticalidad aspiracional frente a la horizontalidad acogedora, la opacidad del muro frente a la transparencia del cerramiento, en un gesto que transforma el espacio religioso en un lugar también de encuentro cívico, de descanso o contemplación profana. La cubierta en forma de ola o pliegue recuerda tanto a una carpa como a un gesto caligráfico, sugiriendo movimiento en contraste con la rigidez solemne del templo, y sus curvas blancas se deslizan como un trazo musical bajo las gárgolas, sin rozarlas. Un ejemplo emblemático de este diálogo lo ofrece la cafetería del Mariendom de Linz en Austria, es una composición respetuosa pero audaz, que abre el patrimonio al presente sin necesidad de mimetismos ni rupturas violentas. Así, la arquitectura se convierte en una forma de mediación temporal, capaz de tejer continuidad sin nostalgia y novedad sin arrogancia.

 

The Spanish Rental Room Crisis

In recent years, the Spanish rental market has experienced a dramatic shift, where the demand for shared living spaces has surged to unsustainable levels, reaching a point in which up to 22 individuals are vying for each room available for rent, a statistic that reflects not only the growing pressure on urban housing but also the broader social consequences of insufficient housing policies and stagnant wages. This phenomenon is especially pronounced in major cities like Madrid and Barcelona, where rising property prices, an influx of temporary workers, students, and migrants, and the conversion of flats into tourist rentals have squeezed the long-term rental supply to its limits, leading to a competitive and precarious market. For many young people and low-income individuals, renting an entire flat has become unattainable, pushing them towards shared accommodations where the demand vastly outpaces availability, inflating prices even for modest or poorly maintained rooms and often forcing tenants to accept precarious conditions, lack of privacy, or even informal arrangements. A particularly telling example comes from a recent listing in Madrid, where over 500 applications were received within hours for a single room priced at €600, showcasing the desperation and urgency with which people seek stable housing. This imbalance fosters social stress, residential instability, and in some cases, exploitation, as landlords gain unchecked power over increasingly vulnerable tenants. In conclusion, this saturation of the rental room market is not merely a symptom of housing scarcity, but an alarm bell pointing toward deeper systemic inequalities, requiring immediate intervention through public housing initiatives, regulation of tourist rentals, and incentives for affordable long-term letting to restore balance and dignity to the act of securing a place to live.

Epistemological Thresholds in Contemporary Knowledge Production

In today's landscape of complex thinking, the terms interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity function not only as methodological categories but also as contested epistemic horizons, originally emerging as critical responses to the hyper-specialization of scientific knowledge; interdisciplinarity refers to the structured interaction between distinct disciplines while preserving their individual identities, whereas transdisciplinarity seeks a more radical integration, aiming to transcend disciplinary boundaries and reconfigure the very architectures of knowledge production, as seen in programs like “Interdisciplinary Explorations” at the Iméra Institute, which emphasizes the circulation and migration of concepts across diverse fields—from natural sciences to the arts—based on a nomadic logic of knowledge that disrupts conventional academic hierarchies; offering a holistic perspective capable of articulating multilayered systems, making it particularly fertile ground for transdisciplinary approaches, which do not merely aggregate knowledge but weave together different ontological levels, turning the network into a living metaphor of crossing, in-betweenness, and going beyond disciplines; hence, these approaches are not mutually exclusive but reflect varying degrees of conceptual integration, and the key to employing them lies not in rigid definitions but in their operational power within specific contexts of research, education, or artistic creation, as exemplified by academic programs, which value candidates capable of navigating these epistemological tensions through innovative pedagogical proposals that engage the challenges of contemporary thought.

Wellbeing as a Relational and Cultural Process

Wellbeing is conceptualised through three interdependent dimensions—material, relational, and subjective—which collectively form a dynamic and contextually grounded understanding of human flourishing. The material domain includes tangible elements such as income, education, health, and access to resources, while the relational dimension addresses social ties, institutional engagement, power relations, and identity. The subjective component encompasses individual perceptions, cultural values, aspirations, and the moral frameworks within which people make sense of their lives. These dimensions are not isolated but co-constitutive, meaning each informs and shapes the others through processes unfolding across time and space. The approach critiques the dominant focus on negative indicators like poverty or exclusion by proposing a positive, holistic, and person-centred lens, while also resisting individualistic and Western-centric assumptions that often frame psychological wellbeing. Drawing on empirical research from diverse global contexts, the analysis underscores the cultural and relational embeddedness of wellbeing, highlighting how collective norms and social positioning mediate individual experiences. Wellbeing is not treated as a static state to be measured or attained but as a process of becoming, intrinsically political and shaped by structural forces, historical legacies, and social dynamics. This framework also points to the importance of community-level engagement, where participatory methods can surface local aspirations, inequalities, and potential for collective action. Ultimately, the wellbeing perspective proposed here invites a reconfiguration of policy and development practice, aligning interventions with the lived realities, moral economies, and relational ecologies that constitute everyday life.

White, S.C., 2008. But what is Wellbeing? A framework for analysis in social and development policy and practice. University of Bath

Turismens dubbla ansikte

Turism är en av världens största industrier. En industri med en mjuk kärna: främlingen som vill bli förförd. Turistens sökande blick - efter det lustfyllda, det som är exklusivt, det man kan skriva hem om - förändrar städer. En del lever upp i blicken, som Luzern i Schweiz där de exklusiva armbandsuren – en i sig tynande industri – upptäckts av den allt mer ökande kinesiska Europaturismen. En del går under i blicken, som Florens, en stad som bett om att få hamna på UNESCOs lista över hotade kulturarv, på grund av turismen och vad den gör med en plats. Vi har sökt i de många spåren av turistens blick. Längs den nutida kinesiska Grand touren som ser Europa som en enda plats med starka varumärken som Luis Vitton, Paris, Hugo Boss och Florens. Tillbaka till den gamla Grand touren, 1700- och det tidiga 1800-talets, när nordeuropéer återupptäckte och samlade in det klassiska Europas kulturkanon. De kom hem och byggde palats i nyklassicism. Vi har klivit genom de snurrande hotellens revolving doors, turismens kanske tydligaste byggda objekt: En stor maskin – en boendemaskin – men en maskin som främst ska leverera en atmosfär. Och vidare följt längs pilgrimsvandringens småorter, en vandring till synes bort från massturismen och lyxkonsumtionen, där den individuella resan blir helig. I turismen finns ofta en längtan tillbaka, till svunna tider och berättelser, orörda tillstånd, men också en bild av hur framtidens städer kan kan komma att gestalta sig. 

https://www.stadenpodcast.se/avsnitt/67-staden-turistens-blick

The Forest in the Geometric City

Urban parks are increasingly recognized not only as green infrastructure but as essential cultural and ecological assets that articulate the relationship between city, memory, and environment. This work explores the complex transformations experienced by El Bosque in La Plata, a 19th-century park originally conceived under hygienist principles and integrated into the rational urban grid of the planned capital city. Over time, this foundational logic has been eroded by institutional expansion, spatial fragmentation, and restricted public access—resulting in the loss of over 65% of the original open surface. Yet, despite this degradation, El Bosque continues to serve as a symbolic and functional core for the wider metropolitan area, linking La Plata, Berisso, and Ensenada. Through a landscape urbanism perspective, the research identifies two strategic enclaves—the now-inactive Zoological Garden and the underutilized Hippodrome—as key to unlocking the park’s reintegration. These zones, currently disconnected from the park’s broader identity, are reimagined as catalysts for continuity, capable of restoring ecological balance, social inclusiveness, and recreational diversity. The proposal envisions a network of micro-landscapes, pedestrian circuits, and civic platforms that dissolve architectural barriers and respond to contemporary urban demands, while respecting the park’s historical and environmental significance. This approach challenges the rigid dichotomies of natural versus artificial, or built versus open, offering instead a dynamic model of adaptive reuse rooted in the lived experience of public space. The forest within the geometric city becomes not a relic of the past, but a renewed spatial framework for collective urban life—one that integrates memory, mobility, and ecological intelligence within a cohesive and resilient urban form.

Carasatorre, M.C., 2024. Urban Park and Contemporary Life: The Forest in the Geometric City. Doctoral thesis. Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism, National University of La Plata.

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.

Urbanas

Staden

Since 2013, Staden has been a long-running, richly reported podcast that thinks holistically about the city: Dan Hallemar and Håkan Forsell walk, read and listen through streets from Kiruna to Istanbul, Los Angeles to Cairo, mapping how architecture, memory, labour, faith, music, infrastructure and everyday life braid into urban form. Their method is political without slogans—treating buildings, archives, sounds and habits as clues—so episodes move fluently between planning and poetry, welfare histories and market shocks, monuments and margins. The tone is curious, exact and generous: each city becomes a case study in seeing, where contradictions—beauty and violence, nostalgia and reinvention—coexist. Staden is, simply, a patient school of urban attention, turning listeners into better readers of places.

Kiruna, Lissabon, Hjo, Manchester, Berlin, Karlskrona, Stockholm, Borlänge, Uppsala, Västerås, Tel Aviv, Sundsvall, Helsingfors, London, Köpenhamn, Södertälje, Wien, Brno, Halmstad, Belgrad, Paris, Malmö, Alexandria, Amsterdam, Ruhr, Bryssel, Istanbul, Budapest, Borås, Oslo, Warszawa, Baltimore, Savannah, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Diego/Tijuana, Sala, Kalmar, Prag, Rom, Neapel, Thessaloniki, Skellefteå, Linköping, Visby, Moskva, Hudiksvall, Örebro, Örnsköldsvik, Norrköping, Antwerpen, Malung, Bredäng, Göteborg, Luleå, Tuzla, Sarajevo, Split, Växjö, Fruängen, Landskrona, Tunis, Fès, Islamsk stad, Liljeholmen, Huskvarna, Sheffield, Blackpool, Liverpool, Norra England, Östersund, Zürich, Hamburg, Riga, Minsk, Karlstad, Karlshamn, Sigtuna, Motala, Gävle, Eskilstuna, Skaraborg, Falun, Umeå, Sundbyberg, Gdańsk, Lund, Lillehammer, Trondheim, Kairo, Helsingborg, Luxemburg, Trier, Leipzig, Dresden, Málaga, Córdoba.

https://www.stadenpodcast.se/bladdra

Stadsplanering, Böcker, Trauman, Villastaden, Aktivism, Frågepod, Grannskap, Mixtape, Skolan, Shopping, Utopier, Turismen, Döden, Tjuv och polis, Kulturarvets teater, New Towns, Ensamheten, Eliten, Tro och religion, Känslorna, Tiden, Katastrofen, Musiken, Arkiven och biblioteken, Hälsan, Kollektivtrafiken, Råvaran, Hemmets rum, 1980-talet, Folksamlingen, Konstverk, Natten, Information, Marken, Järnvägen, Monumenten, Ljuden, Stad av gator, Gränser, Sjukhus (arbetsplats), Glömskan, Energi, Kyrkan, Fotografiet, Produktionens arkitektur, HSB, Tiotalet, Stockholms 1990-tal, Öar, De gamlas stad, Talkshow tour Göteborgs 1970-tal, Talkshow tour Malmös 1980-tal.

Sedan 2013 har Staden varit en långlivad och rikt berättad podcast som betraktar staden på ett holistiskt sätt: Dan Hallemar och Håkan Forsell vandrar, läser och lyssnar genom gator från Kiruna till Istanbul, från Los Angeles till Kairo, och kartlägger hur arkitektur, minne, arbete, tro, musik, infrastruktur och vardagsliv flätas samman i den urbana formen. Deras metod är politisk utan slagord – byggnader, arkiv, ljud och vanor behandlas som ledtrådar – så avsnitten rör sig obehindrat mellan planering och poesi, välfärdshistorier och marknadskriser, monument och marginaler. Tonen är nyfiken, exakt och generös: varje stad blir en övning i att se, där motsägelser – skönhet och våld, nostalgi och omdaning – samexisterar. Staden är helt enkelt en tålmodig skola i urban uppmärksamhet, som gör lyssnaren till en bättre läsare av platser.

PSALM

Read widely to absorb vocabulary, rhythm, and structure; write daily to build fluency; keep a research journal as a source of raw ideas; structure early with headings and clear transitions; keep sentences sharp and paragraphs focused on one idea with a topic sentence; read work aloud to test rhythm and clarity; integrate references as extensions of your argument, always followed by analysis; check the significance of each point for the overall thesis; edit by subtraction, cutting redundancy and weak connectors; seek feedback with detachment; value concision over verbosity; highlight originality in your contribution; and treat writing as disciplined labour, with schedules and deliberate practice targeting weaknesses, so that clarity, consistency, and rigor become the core of your craft.

Urbanas

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.

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

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

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.

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. 

A Grammar of Less

In urban and ecological contexts burdened by accumulation, subtraction operates not as destruction but as a method of clarity, a deliberate stripping away that reveals rather than removes. In The Natural, this grammar takes a quiet but insistent form: a geometric trench carved into a forest does not aim to harm but to disclose—the fragility of the soil, the tension between organic continuity and human incision. Here, the act of cutting is not final but propositional; it opens a space where both natural and constructed layers become visible at once. The forest is not backdrop but actor, and the subtraction becomes a form of listening, a way to make palpable what is usually absorbed into landscape. In a world saturated with additions—layers of concrete, signage, digital noise—removal becomes resistance, a sparse but potent vocabulary that foregrounds what is usually hidden. The intervention doesn’t scream; it whispers with precision, allowing the terrain to speak through its own wounds. Subtraction, in this sense, is not an aesthetic gesture but an epistemological one: it uncovers the logic of place, the stratigraphy of time and use, offering a temporary pause from the city’s relentless layering. Rather than impose meaning, it releases latent significance already embedded in the site. In The Natural, art becomes a scalpel of attention, cutting not to sever but to expose, inviting us to reconsider the surface as a threshold rather than a boundary.

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 tool. Architectural Research Quarterly, 15(1), pp.47–55. doi:10.1017/S1359135511000352.

Coastal Renewal in Copenhagen

The city of Copenhagen has taken a bold step towards reconnecting urban life with nature through the creation of Nordør – New Park in Nordhavn, a 30-hectare coastal park designed by renowned studio SLA, marking the city's most significant landscape project in over a decade; this ambitious initiative reimagines a former industrial site, transforming decades of construction debris into a vibrant, self-generating natural environment where beaches, sports grounds, playgrounds, lagoons, grasslands, forest edges, and marine reefs coexist harmoniously through minimal intervention, allowing natural processes to unfold organically over time rather than imposing rigid structures; the project stands as a climate-positive and biodiversity-rich model, actively sequestering more carbon than it emits while expanding habitats for rare species and creating a dynamic interface between land and sea; developed through an extensive community dialogue, it reflects the needs and aspirations of local residents, nature groups, and sports associations, offering both lively and contemplative spaces, from universally accessible recreational zones in the south to tranquil wilderness areas in the north prioritising wildlife observation; key features include The Stub, a 24-metre-high viewing tower, The Ore, a west-facing lagoon beach with small islands, and The Forest Edge, a one-kilometre species-rich woodland stretch—the longest in Copenhagen; Nordør not only elevates the city’s environmental resilience but also becomes a global exemplar for cities seeking to integrate ecological responsibility with urban identity, illustrating how landscape architecture can lead societal transformation by fostering daily, meaningful encounters with nature in densely populated settings. >

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

The persistent fascination with the bag projects—Blue, Yellow, Green, 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.

Thursday

 

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.

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.

AMARES - SILENCIO - MAITE DONO

Urbanas

Urbanas

 

Some Bags

Far from being a trivial or purely functional object, the bag becomes a sculptural device within socioplastic practice—not as a container of things but as a carrier of relations, trajectories, and urban affects. Its lightness, foldability, and nomadic nature stand in stark contrast to traditional notions of sculpture as fixed, heavy, and stable. With the bag, volume is variable, form is contingent, and meaning is not imposed by closed authorship but emerges through use, transit, and shared circulation. Each bag moving through the city accumulates gestures, residues, invisible histories: it is no monument, yet it serves as a soft archive, a malleable witness to the tensions and connections shaping public space. Its precarity is not a limitation but rather its aesthetic and political condition—by refusing to stay in one place, it remains available for encounter, reinterpretation, and accident. As sculpture, the bag does not seek to assert itself but to blend in, to be affected by its surroundings, becoming a mobile threshold between art and the everyday. It proposes a way of being in the world through portability, tactility, and a minimalism that refuses to stand still—a practice that transforms the act of carrying into a civic choreography, where art is not something to be contemplated from afar but something to be dragged, held, passed from hand to hand.

Urbanas

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.

Urbanas

 

 

Wednesday