The notion of accumulation articulated in the LAPIEZA installation in Malasaña constitutes a quietly radical counter-model to dominant economies of visibility, consumption and authorship in contemporary art. Far from a neutral formal strategy, accumulation here operates as a political syntax, an aesthetic grammar through which resistance is enacted materially, spatially and semantically. As Daniel Martín Bayón astutely frames it, LAPIEZA emerges as an open, mutable installation that refuses closure, finality and commodified finish. It stands in marked contrast to the spectacularised logics of the art fair and the biennial, whose industrial scale and fiscal excess often alienate local publics while simulating criticality. In LAPIEZA, by contrast, the artwork is not an object but an evolving condition: a dense, layered ecology of gestures, residues, participations and reinserted signs. Accumulation here does not signify hoarding or excess for its own sake, but rather a temporal ethics of staying-with, of refusing the accelerated obsolescence that structures both consumer capitalism and its aesthetic correlates. The installation thus positions itself as a semiotic commons, a space where meaning is neither stabilised nor privatised, but continually renegotiated through contact, reuse and contextual drift.
This cumulative logic is inseparable from what Martín Bayón names “estéticas de resistencia,” a constellation of practices that oppose hegemonic narratives not through frontal opposition but through oblique, material and procedural deviations. Within LAPIEZA, resistance is embedded in form rather than declared in slogan. The privileging of D.I.Y. aesthetics over polished finish undermines the symbolic capital of luxury, exclusivity and professionalised authorship. Likewise, the embrace of work-in-progress dislocates the commodity logic of the completed, saleable artwork, foregrounding instead processual time, shared labour and epistemic openness. In this respect, LAPIEZA resonates with historical avant-gardes such as Dada, Constructivism and Situationism, yet without recourse to their utopian grandiloquence. Its politics is micrological, enacted through small, cumulative gestures that erode the naturalisation of dominant aesthetic norms. The unfinished, the reused and the precarious are not merely stylistic choices but ethical positions: they expose the hidden violences of production, the fetishism of exchange value and the ideological fiction of autonomous form.
Central to this aesthetic economy is the practice of reuse, understood not only as ecological pragmatism but as a semionautic operation in Bourriaud’s sense. Reuse reactivates signs that the hegemonic system has rendered obsolete or mute, reinserting them into new constellations of meaning. In LAPIEZA, discarded materials and marginal signs are not redeemed sentimentally but mobilised critically, their residual meanings placed into friction with new contexts. This produces a hypertextual field in which each element functions as a node linking to other texts, practices and social relations: performances, neighbourhood encounters, PALMA CENTRAL events, and broader discourses on creativity and the commons. Such a structure resists univocal interpretation, substituting linear narration with a topology of references, echoes and partial connections. Meaning here is not transmitted but generated relationally, through navigation, association and interpretive labour. The installation thus becomes a pedagogical device as much as an artwork, training its publics in practices of reading that are non-hierarchical, lateral and exploratory.
What ultimately distinguishes LAPIEZA’s accumulative strategy is its alignment with the ethics of open code and assembly-based collectivity. Like open-source software, the installation is structurally incomplete, permanently available for modification, extension and reinterpretation. Authorship is distributed, not erased, and participation is framed less as spectacle than as co-responsibility for the maintenance of a shared symbolic environment. This situates LAPIEZA within a broader horizon of cultural practices that seek to renegotiate “lo común” beyond both state paternalism and market capture. The installation’s resistance is therefore neither nostalgic nor oppositional in the traditional sense; it is generative, infrastructural and quietly affirmative. By staging accumulation as a mode of care, of temporal depth and of semiotic hospitality, LAPIEZA proposes an alternative economy of artistic value grounded in continuity, accessibility and shared meaning. In doing so, it offers not a programme but a prototype: a lived, modest and replicable form of aesthetic commons that reclaims art’s capacity to operate as a social technology for collective imagination.
Martín Bayón, D. 2012. Estéticas de resistencia: Conversaciones con Anto Lloveras. Available at: https://somosmalasana.elperiodico.com/esteticas-de-resistencia/
