Anto Lloveras’s project THE WORD / 1000 articulates a radical reconfiguration of exhibitionary practice through what he terms “socioplastics”: a mutable constellation of actions, texts, places, and artworks that refuses closure. Framed by the aphoristic motto “Adolf Loos was right,” the project aligns itself with a critical modernist lineage that privileges conceptual clarity over ornamental excess, yet it does so from within a post-digital, post-institutional condition. The invocation of Loos functions less as doctrinal allegiance than as rhetorical leverage, situating THE WORD within a lineage of anti-decorative ethics while foregrounding language itself as the new architectural skin, the “topcoat.” The online museum LAPIEZA, with its 75 rooms, 75 exhibitions, and 1000 artworks, operates as both archive and generative engine, dissolving the boundary between documentation and production.
In this sense, THE WORD is not an exhibition but an epistemic field, where meaning accrues through seriality, mobility, and narrative accretion rather than through spatial containment. Lloveras’s insistence on “no leftovers” underscores an ethics of total expenditure: each gesture, encounter, and utterance is metabolised into the work’s evolving grammar. The result is an unstable museology that privileges process over objecthood, and relation over representation, positioning the artist as both author and infrastructural agent within a dispersed, networked ecology of art. The Vienna episode operates as a performative hinge within this broader topology, staging the city as both site and signifier. The itinerary—Hinterland Galerie, FLUC, Friday Exit, Kunsthalle LAB in Bratislava—reads as a dérive through contested zones of contemporary European art, where borders, displacement, and infrastructural residue recur as thematic motifs. Lloveras’s attentiveness to minor gestures—a chewing-gum ritual, a billboard-performance, small trucks looping endlessly, clay struck by youthful bodies—signals a phenomenological commitment to micro-events as carriers of symbolic density. These encounters are not merely observed; they are transcribed into the work as narrative matter, extending the ontology of the artwork into the lived temporality of travel, hospitality, and shared meals. The addition of Olbrich and Loos to the Blue Bags sculpture literalises architectural history as portable relic, compressing Viennese modernism into tactile fragments that circulate within the artist’s nomadic economy. Even the foraging of bear-leaves and the making of pesto become aestheticised acts, folded into the conceptual score of 1000. Here, the quotidian is neither romanticised nor neutralised; it is instrumentalised as a unit of relational meaning, reinforcing Lloveras’s commitment to an expanded field where art and life are not reconciled but productively entangled.
At the structural level, THE WORD / 1000 advances a model of narrative curatorship that destabilises traditional hierarchies between artist, critic, and institution. The “translatorial curatorial series” posits curating as an act of linguistic and situational translation, whereby heterogeneous experiences are rendered commensurable through textual and spatial montage. This resonates with the legacy of conceptual art’s dematerialisation of the object and its scepticism toward critical mediation, as evoked in Lloveras’s closing reflection on the obsolescence of the critic. Yet, rather than abolishing interpretation, THE WORD redistributes it, embedding hermeneutic labour within the work itself. The blog-based dissemination of the project functions as a performative archive, collapsing the temporal lag between event and exegesis. In doing so, Lloveras anticipates a post-critical condition in which the artwork generates its own discursive scaffolding, rendering external commentary supplementary rather than constitutive. The proposed extension into the United Nations of Art and the SAMSA network further amplifies this ambition, envisioning a supranational platform where sculptural attractors catalyse social awareness. This rhetoric of globality is not naïvely utopian; it is grounded in the pragmatics of networking, hosting, and infrastructural improvisation, aligning artistic production with modes of logistical and affective labour typically excluded from aesthetic discourse.
Ultimately, THE WORD operates as both medium and message, asserting language as the primary material of contemporary art while refusing its stabilisation into doctrine. The figure of “1000” functions as a symbolic asymptote: a number that promises totality yet perpetually defers completion. This numerological horizon frames the project as an open system, perpetually absorbing new sites, collaborations, and semantic layers. Lloveras’s practice thus exemplifies what might be termed an ethics of incompletion, where value emerges from circulation rather than accumulation.
By fusing online museology, performative travel, and narrative accretion, THE WORD challenges the spatial fixity and temporal finality of conventional exhibitions. It proposes instead a model of art as infrastructural poetics, in which meaning is generated through connective tissue—between cities, disciplines, and subjectivities. In this sense, the “topcoat” is not a surface embellishment but a conceptual membrane, regulating the permeability between art and its contexts. Lloveras’s project stands as a compelling case study in how contemporary practice can retool the legacies of modernism and conceptualism for a networked present, producing not a monument, but a living grammar of relations.
2015
2014
Lloveras, A. (2016) The Word in Viena – LAPIEZA 1000. Available at: https://antolloveras.blogspot.com/2016/03/the-word-in-viena-0316lapieza-1000.html
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