LAPIEZA, as a long-term decolonial and processual project curated by Anto Lloveras, consistently privileges relational encounters over object-centric production, aligning with Nicolas Bourriaud's relational aesthetics while extending it through socioplastic methodologies that integrate everyday contexts, temporal duration, and digital dissemination. The project's 180+ numbered series since 2009 function as unstable research units, where curatorial practice becomes a form of writing across time, generating micro-ecologies of participation. This analysis focuses on two exemplary series—Supermarket (2012) by Paula Lloveras in Trondheim, Norway, and Stone Dream (2025)—to illuminate how LAPIEZA transforms mundane or minimal elements into sites of performative presence and communal attention. In Supermarket, the supermarket itself becomes a readymade context activated through repetitive daily rituals; in Stone Dream, quiet seasonal gestures foreground absence and listening. Both series exemplify the project's resistance to spectacle, emphasizing fragility, duration, and the redistribution of authorship among participants, contexts, and ephemeral traces. Such interventions critique institutional fixity, proposing instead porous formats that evolve through viewer engagement and archival accumulation.
In Supermarket (2012), Paula Lloveras enacts a subtle occupation of the commercial space, declaring: "I go every day to visit the same installation. I pick some colors. I’m part of this installation." This performative loop reframes the supermarket as a living readymade, echoing Marcel Duchamp's readymades but shifting emphasis from ironic appropriation to embodied relationality. The artist's daily presence—selecting colors, inhabiting the aisles—inserts the body as co-material, blurring distinctions between observer, artwork, and environment. LAPIEZA's framework amplifies this by situating the intervention within a numbered sequence, where context (the supermarket's fluorescent banality, consumer flows) becomes the primary medium. Themes of repetition and routine underscore a critique of capitalist temporality, yet the work avoids didacticism, instead inviting viewers to recognize their own complicity in the space. The series thus enacts socioplastic activation: the commercial site hosts a temporary public, redistributing agency from artist to participant and environment. This porosity prefigures LAPIEZA's later digital hybridity, where physical interventions feed into networked archives, challenging the white-cube's isolation.
Stone Dream (ART SERIES 173, March–April 2025) represents a later maturation of LAPIEZA's relational minimalism, described as "a quiet unfolding at the cusp of seasons—between winter’s weight and spring’s breath." Absent announcement or spectacle, the series deploys humble gestures: stones placed with care, lemons left in soft shadows, a shared salad under open sky. These acts function as silent anchors, traces of presence that listen rather than declare. The work's emphasis on the unnoticed—vanishing presences, seasonal transitions—embodies a politics of attention amid cultural acceleration, resonating with Claire Bishop's critiques of participatory art while prioritizing healing and kinship over confrontation. By renouncing objects for choreography of care, Stone Dream advances LAPIEZA's decolonial ethos: it privileges Indigenous-inspired sensitivity to non-human elements (stones, light, food) and collective rituals, fostering micro-utopias of rest. The series' archival quality—fifteen fragments, one rhythm—reinforces the project's durational ecology, where time accumulates as material, generating continuity through subtle relational bonds rather than monumental statements.
Comparatively, both series illustrate LAPIEZA's evolution from active contextual occupation (Supermarket's daily insertion) to contemplative withdrawal (Stone Dream's listening posture), yet they share a commitment to instability and openness. In an era of digital saturation and institutional precarity, these interventions propose art as a practice of rescue and conversation, countering commodification through ephemeral, site-responsive forms. LAPIEZA's strength lies in this refusal of closure: Supermarket's repetition activates consumer space as relational field, while Stone Dream's minimalism invites interpretation of absence itself. Together, they affirm the project's socioplastic vanguardism, where curation facilitates emergent publics across geographies and media. This model not only resists linear narratives but also enacts a hopeful resistance, positioning relational practice as vital for sustaining cultural vitality amid fragmentation. Here are visual examples from LAPIEZA's broader installations, illustrating the project's use of everyday objects, organic elements, and relational setups that echo themes in the analyzed series: These images capture the hybrid, site-responsive aesthetic—blending natural materials, spatial interventions, and participatory traces—that characterizes LAPIEZA's unstable ecologies. (Anto Lloveras, 2024)
