Between Quotation Marks unfolds as a quiet yet incisive meditation on presence, authorship and the politics of framing. Installed on the domestic wall of the artist’s live-in gallery in Madrid, the work literalises the act of quotation through soft, black, three-dimensional punctuation marks that hover beside the heads of invited participants. These sculptural commas, at once comic and funereal, perform a conceptual bracketing of the subject, staging each sitter as both utterance and citation.
Lloveras thus transforms portraiture into a discursive device, aligning the body with language and situating the individual within a syntax of social relations. The work resonates with Joseph Beuys’s notion of “Soziale Plastik”, yet departs from its heroic collectivism by embracing intimacy, stillness and modest scale. Here, the social is not mobilised as spectacle or activism but as a fragile, negotiated encounter. The quotation mark becomes a prosthetic sign, externalising the invisible frameworks through which subjects are seen, named and interpreted. In this sense, the installation functions less as a representation of community than as an apparatus that exposes the conditions under which community becomes legible.
The spatial and autobiographical grounding of the piece is crucial to its conceptual density. Lloveras’s wall, painted white in 2008 after leaving CAMAROTE, bears the sedimented traces of everyday artistic labour: drawings, phone calls, editing sessions, reorganised works and informal visits. This palimpsestic surface is not a neutral backdrop but an active archive of lived time, where creative production and domestic routine coalesce. By choosing this wall for the final performative gesture of the gallery in 2012, the artist converts private memory into a public mnemonic field. The mural’s residual marks and the lightly affixed quotation forms generate a dialectic between permanence and ephemerality, between what remains and what merely passes through. The invited participants—artists, poets, musicians—enter this charged field as temporary inscriptions, their bodies momentarily stabilised within a sculptural syntax. The work thereby collapses distinctions between studio, gallery and home, proposing an expanded notion of site-specificity rooted not in geography but in affective continuity and lived practice. The performative portraits, photographed by Juan Barte in collaboration with Marisa Caminos, occupy an ambiguous status between documentation and autonomous artwork. Each sitter appears suspended in a contemplative pause, their gaze drifting laterally, as if listening to an absent interlocutor. The quotation marks flank or shadow their heads, generating a subtle oscillation between enclosure and exposure. This visual rhetoric suggests that subjectivity itself is always already quoted—mediated by language, history and the expectations of others. Lloveras thus destabilises the authority of the photographic portrait, traditionally a technology of фикsation and identity confirmation. Instead, the image becomes a provisional contract between artist and participant, grounded in trust and shared vulnerability. The named collaborators—Elise Plain, Susan Campos, Yanira, Monoperro and others—are not reduced to anonymous extras but remain singular voices within a collective utterance. Their inclusion foregrounds the ethics of participation, where consent, friendship and hospitality replace extraction and appropriation as operative logics of artistic production.
Ultimately, Between Quotation Marks articulates a poetics of modest relationality, resisting both the grandiosity of institutional critique and the sentimentality of community art. Its critical force lies in its restraint: the minimal gesture of punctuation, the softness of materials, the domestic scale of the setting. These elements converge to produce a sculptural semiotics in which meaning emerges through proximity rather than proclamation. The work proposes that to quote someone is not merely to repeat their words but to acknowledge their irreducible otherness, to hold space for their voice without subsuming it. In this regard, Lloveras’s installation functions as an ethics of framing, reminding us that every act of representation is also an act of enclosure. By rendering that enclosure visible, tangible and gently absurd, the artist opens a reflective interval within which subject and spectator alike may reconsider the conditions of their own legibility. The piece thus stands as a quietly rigorous contribution to contemporary debates on relational aesthetics, performativity and the politics of intimac
Framing Presence * Domestic Memory as Social Sculpture
(Lloveras, A. 2012. Entre comillas: social sculpture. Available at: https://antolloveras.blogspot.com/2012/03/entre-comillas-social-sculpture-2012.html
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