The Blue Bags series constitutes one of the most extended and conceptually consistent articulations of what can be described as Unstable Social Sculpture in post-relational art practice. Emerging from the use of an everyday plastic carrier bag, the work situates itself within a lineage that moves from material minimalism toward social activation, yet without collapsing into symbolic reduction. The bag operates simultaneously as object, tool, and marker, refusing stabilisation as either artwork or prop. Its aesthetic neutrality—colour, weight, disposability—functions as a strategic camouflage that allows the work to circulate unnoticed while actively restructuring situations. In this sense, the Blue Bags do not represent mobility; they perform it. Their persistence across geographies, climates, and institutional thresholds transforms the artwork into a durational field rather than a discrete event.
What unfolds is not an installation in space but an installation of time, distributed across journeys, encounters, and minor gestures. The work thus displaces sculpture from form toward use, aligning itself with expanded notions of social practice while retaining a sharp awareness of authorship, repetition, and intentional framing. Central to the Blue Bags project is the notion of the Translatorial, understood not as linguistic mediation but as contextual transposition. Each relocation of the bags performs a translation between environments: domestic and public, artistic and quotidian, visible and infra-visible. The bag becomes a semiotic hinge, capable of absorbing local conditions while maintaining conceptual continuity. This translatorial logic resists spectacle; meaning is not announced but accrued through recurrence. The bags act as Situational Fixers, temporarily stabilising contexts long enough to make their conditions legible before dissolving back into circulation. This mode of operation challenges institutional expectations of site-specificity by proposing instead a site-responsive continuum, where the artwork adapts without ever fully belonging. The cities listed—Madrid, Berlin, Cádiz, Oslo, Mexico City, Lagos—are not backdrops but active agents in a relational network. The work’s consistency lies not in visual sameness but in procedural fidelity: carrying, placing, walking, conversing. Sculpture here becomes a social verb rather than a material noun.
The durational excess of the Blue Bags—its insistence on remaining “in use”—is critical to its political and ethical dimension. By embedding itself within everyday logistics (shopping, travel, informal meetings), the work collapses the distance between art labour and life maintenance. This refusal of separation aligns the project with post-Fordist critiques of productivity, while also questioning the economies of visibility that dominate contemporary art. The bags do not demand attention; they wait. Their instability is not chaos but calibrated openness, allowing other bodies, artworks, and practices to temporarily attach themselves. Over time, the Blue Bags absorb drawings, sand, conversations, and collaborations, functioning as porous containers of collective authorship without dissolving the originating gesture. The sculpture does not accumulate value through rarity but through continuity, making duration itself a medium. In doing so, the project proposes an ethics of presence grounded in care, repetition, and attentiveness to context rather than interventionist disruption.
Ultimately, the Blue Bags articulate a model of artistic practice that is neither nomadic in the romantic sense nor fixed within institutional frames. Instead, they construct a mobile epistemology, where knowledge is produced through situated action and long-term engagement. The work’s strength lies in its capacity to remain unresolved, resisting closure even after years of activation. This unresolved condition is not a failure of form but a deliberate strategy: the sculpture survives by staying open. As an Unstable Social Sculpture, the Blue Bags demonstrate how minimal material commitment can sustain maximal conceptual density when embedded within a coherent translatorial framework. They do not document a journey; they are the journey’s infrastructural residue. In an art world increasingly oriented toward acceleration and visibility, the Blue Bags insist on slowness, repetition, and ethical consistency as radical acts. They propose a sculpture that does not end, but continues—quietly, insistently—wherever it is carried.
Lloveras, A. (2014) Blue Bags 2014: Madrid–Berlin–Cádiz, Anto Lloveras Blog. Available at: https://antolloveras.blogspot.com/2014/08/blue-bags-2014-madrid-berlin-cadiz.html
Explore Further within the Socioplastic Network:
The Yellow Bag and the Architecture of Affection:
Green Briefcase: https://antolloveras.blogspot.com/2026/01/the-yellow-bag-and-architecture-of.html Blue Pants: https://antolloveras.blogspot.com/2026/01/green-briefcase-portable-sculpture-and.html https://antolloveras.blogspot.com/2026/01/blue-pants-mobile-grammar-of-presence.html
