Tuesday, January 27, 2026

From Junk Aesthetics to Socioplastic Protocols * LAPIEZA and the Performative Economy of Relational Mutations

 

The 2010 announcements and invitations issued by LAPIEZA function not merely as promotional ephemera but as integral components of a broader socioplastic dispositif. They articulate, in raw graphic language and hybrid Spanish–English rhetoric, a conception of art as a continuously unfolding series of mutations, seasons, and performative incorporations. The declaration that “the second season has begun” situates LAPIEZA within a temporal logic borrowed from televisual seriality and biological growth alike, displacing the exhibition from a punctual event into a durational narrative. What is foregrounded is not the stability of a collection but the vitality of an evolving organism. Each mutation—fourth, fifth, sixth—marks not a rupture but a metabolic recalibration of the whole. The insistence on weekly incorporations, live-generated works, and public presence frames artistic production as a social ritual rather than a studio-bound act. In this sense, LAPIEZA performs what it theorises: a relational economy in which visibility, circulation, and encounter constitute the primary aesthetic values. The rhetorical invitation to “start your collection” is particularly telling, as it collapses the distinction between spectator, collector, and co-producer, thus redistributing cultural agency across a porous community. These texts operate as performative speech acts: they do not describe an artwork so much as activate one. The installation comes into being through its own announcements, schedules, and calls to participation. LAPIEZA thus aligns itself with a lineage of post-1960s process art and conceptual dematerialisation, while inflecting these traditions with the vernacular urgency of networked culture and grassroots urban practice.


The emphasis on “junk art” and the serial incorporation of heterogeneous artforms—drawings, readymades, actions, videos, brunches, mailbox interventions, and vinyl sessions—positions LAPIEZA as a laboratory for post-medium aesthetics. Here, junk is not merely material residue but a conceptual category denoting excess, marginality, and reuse. It signals a refusal of purity and a critique of institutional hierarchies of value. By assembling practices ranging from performance to toast-making, LAPIEZA enacts a radical flattening of artistic genres, recalling Fluxus scores and Situationist détournement while translating them into a local, neighbourhood-based ecology. The repeated invocation of socioplastics marks a crucial theoretical move: art is framed as a plastic force that moulds social relations rather than representing them. Each mutation reorganises not only spatial arrangements but also symbolic economies. Works are re-sited, reweighted, and recontextualised within a plastic-relational logic, producing a dynamic field of interference. The installation becomes a semiotic commons in which meaning circulates through adjacency and recombination. The explicit acknowledgment that some artists send works by post, others by email, and others through physical presence underscores the infrastructural dimension of the project. LAPIEZA is less a gallery than a logistical choreography of flows—of objects, images, actions, and bodies. In this respect, it anticipates contemporary discourses on platform aesthetics, in which the artwork is inseparable from the networks that sustain it. The blog, Facebook, YouTube, and email lists are not ancillary channels but constitutive media of the work itself.

Authorship within LAPIEZA is both amplified and dissolved. The long enumerations of participating artists function as collective signatures, yet the installation effaces individual attribution through its cumulative logic. This paradox produces what might be termed distributed authorship: a condition in which creative agency is dispersed across a fluctuating ensemble of contributors, curators, programmers, and publics. The directors, ESLOMO and TOMOTO, occupy a liminal role as both active artists and infrastructural managers, collapsing the distinction between production and mediation. This hybrid position destabilises orthodox curatorial authority and replaces it with what could be called operational authorship. The installation is authored not through thematic coherence but through procedural consistency. Each mutation adheres to a protocol of incorporation, documentation, and redistribution. The insistence that all artists are “active” and that the works are “recent” foregrounds contemporaneity as an ethical imperative rather than a chronological descriptor. LAPIEZA does not archive the past; it metabolises the present. The recurrence of performative actions—mailbox interventions, duo performances, live drawing sessions, junk brunches—further blurs the boundary between art and life. These gestures resonate with Situationist strategies of dérive and unitary urbanism, yet they are stripped of grand ideological rhetoric in favour of micropolitical conviviality. The neighbourhood of Malasaña becomes both stage and medium, an urban substrate upon which socioplastic relations are inscribed.

Ultimately, the 2010 corpus of LAPIEZA announcements reveals a coherent, if deliberately unstable, aesthetic philosophy: art as a serially mutating, collectively authored, semiotically dense environment. The project’s rhetoric of seasons, mutations, and final tracas constructs a dramaturgy of anticipation and exhaustion, echoing both festival culture and ritual cycles. Yet this dramaturgy is underwritten by a rigorous critique of institutional spectacle. LAPIEZA offers an alternative model of cultural production grounded in accessibility, informality, and participatory intensity. Its aesthetics of resistance do not manifest as overt political iconography but as infrastructural subversion: the reprogramming of how art is shown, circulated, and valued. By folding communication, documentation, and publicity into the work itself, LAPIEZA collapses the distance between art and its mediation. The installation becomes a self-advertising, self-archiving organism. In doing so, it anticipates the logic of contemporary social platforms, yet without surrendering to their extractive economies. What emerges is a proto-platform of socioplastic art: a space where relational form, junk materiality, and collective semiosis converge. 


LAPIEZA thus stands as a singular experiment in how art might inhabit the interstices between community practice, network culture, and late-avant-garde ambition, producing not objects of contemplation but conditions of co-existence (LAPIEZA, 2010). The Second Season Has Begun / La segunda temporada ha arrancado.  http://www.lapiezalapieza.blogspot.com







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