FLIPAS! emerges as a paradigmatic case of contemporary live-art research in which urban space, performative body and audiovisual mediation are braided into a single epistemic field. Conceived at the Goethe-Institut Madrid with the support of Acción Cultural Española, the project positions itself neither as festival nor as exhibition, but as an experimental dispositif: a temporary infrastructure for thinking-through-practice. The city is not merely a backdrop but a medium—Madrid becomes stage, laboratory and archive simultaneously. The ten-part audiovisual series titled Camino a Frankfurt functions as both documentation and autonomous artwork, where the act of recording is inseparable from the choreographic event itself. This duality situates FLIPAS! within a lineage of expanded performance practices that reject the opposition between live presence and mediated trace. Instead, the project proposes a dynamic continuum in which gesture survives as image, rhythm and memory.
The convergence of dancers, graffiti artists, musicians and visual narrators foregrounds hybridity not as eclecticism, but as method: a transdisciplinary grammar in which movement, sound and image co-produce meaning. What is at stake is the construction of a moving archive—an archive that does not fossilise action, but remains activated through repetition, translation and travel. In this sense, FLIPAS! resonates with current debates in performance studies concerning liveness, documentation and the politics of visibility, while anchoring these questions in the specificity of urban experience. Central to this inquiry are the performative languages developed by Toezio and Robozee, whose robotic vocabularies articulate a precise negotiation between control and fracture. Their movements operate through discontinuity: sharp isolations, temporal jumps and calculated pauses that foreground the mechanics of the body as both machine and affective surface. The robotic is not deployed here as mere stylistic reference, but as a critical tool to expose the thresholds between human agency, technological imagination and rhythmic discipline. These choreographies unfold as sequences of ellipses, where meaning resides as much in what is omitted as in what is shown. The audiovisual editing—marked by abrupt cuts and stroboscopic logic—extends this aesthetic of interruption, aligning corporeal gesture with cinematic syntax. J. Mayoraga’s theoretical reflections, embedded within the process, articulate this logic through concepts of void, silence and tangency. Drawing parallels between silence in contemporary music, the gap between photograms in stop-motion, and the step-like articulation of robotic dance, Mayoraga frames absence as productive force. The “value of the gap” becomes a shared conceptual axis, allowing disparate practices to resonate without collapsing into homogeneity. Here, theory does not illustrate practice, nor does practice merely exemplify theory; rather, both circulate within the same experimental ecology, reinforcing FLIPAS! as a space of thinking-in-motion.
The city itself plays an active choreographic role, particularly in the project’s performative dérives along Madrid Río. These urban walks—documented in Anto Lloveras’ blog—extend the studio into the public realm, transforming pedestrian movement into compositional material. The stroll from Alonso to Usera, culminating in the encounter with an “intruder,” stages the city as a porous field of chance, friction and encounter. Such gestures recall Situationist strategies of psychogeography, yet they are rearticulated through the lens of contemporary performance and urban art. The body navigates infrastructural rhythms, social textures and architectural thresholds, producing a situated knowledge of space that is irreducible to cartography. Importantly, these actions resist spectacle; they privilege attention over display, process over product. The blog format reinforces this ethos, functioning as a para-archive that captures detours, reflections and minor events often excluded from official documentation. In doing so, FLIPAS! challenges dominant narratives of urban art that prioritise visibility and impact, proposing instead an ethics of situated practice. The city is not consumed as image but engaged as interlocutor, a co-author in the unfolding choreography.
The pedagogical dimension of FLIPAS! crystallises this ethics most clearly, particularly in the Saturday workshop where participants learn basic arm and foot movements. This act of transmission is neither neutral nor merely instructional; it constitutes an aesthetic appropriation by the collective body. Learning becomes performance, and pedagogy becomes a form of authorship distributed across participants. Such moments reveal FLIPAS! as an experiment in radical education, where knowledge is embodied, provisional and shared. The project thus exceeds the framework of artistic production to operate as a social laboratory, testing how practices circulate, mutate and endure. As Camino a Frankfurt suggests, the journey is both literal and conceptual: gestures travel with bodies, memories and recordings, reactivating themselves in new contexts. FLIPAS! ultimately proposes a model of contemporary art grounded in mobility, hybridity and critical attentiveness—an art that does not seek closure, but remains open to reconfiguration. In an era marked by accelerated consumption of images, its insistence on the gap, the pause and the collective rehearsal offers a compelling counterpoint: a slow, rigorous and generous choreography of thought.
FILM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k741-si79yQ&list=PL5jD5W08IxLIxcS08yPQjtZbroR3-NjY6
Lloveras, A. (2022) FLIPAS! Camino a Frankfurt 2022. Available at: https://antolloveras.blogspot.com/2022/01/flipas-camino-frankfurt-2022.html
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