The passage from the socioplastic lot to the relational tag collage marks a decisive epistemic shift in the practice developed around LAPIEZA between 2011 and 2015. What is at stake is not merely a change of format—from physical compilation to hyperlinked image—but a reconfiguration of how artistic relations are indexed, stored, and activated. The socioplastic lot operates as a frontal condensation: a materially bounded object that nonetheless encapsulates a dense web of actions, encounters, and performative residues. As such, it functions as a two-dimensional transfer of a spatial and relational process, a metarepresentational device that renders visible the otherwise ephemeral dynamics of a mutant installation. The later emergence of relational tag collages radicalises this logic by foregrounding hyperlinkability as an aesthetic condition. Here, the lot no longer simply contains relations; it behaves as a cloud of expandable references, a visual interface for navigating a dispersed archive. This transition from physical to virtual does not dematerialise the work but intensifies its relational density, proposing an ecology of signs in which circulation, mobility, and contingency become constitutive formal values rather than secondary effects. Within this framework, the socioplastic lot can be read through the lens of relational aesthetics as articulated by Nicolas Bourriaud. The viewer is positioned as a semionaut, navigating among fragments and references to construct a provisional landscape of meaning. Crucially, these constructions resist closure: they are texts composed of texts, images composed of other images, each fragment saturated with polysemy. The lot thus behaves as a static hypertext, an apparent paradox that underscores its conceptual ambition. Its precarious, improvised aesthetic—objects wrapped, pinned, or loosely assembled—signals a refusal of monumental fixity. Instead, the work embraces an expeditionary logic, as if always ready to be moved, recontextualised, or re-read. In this sense, the socioplastic frame is less an archive than a diagram of relations in flux. It documents without stabilising, remembers without canonising. The shift toward relational tag collages extends this logic into the digital imaginary, where tags function as vectors rather than labels, enabling associative drifts that mirror the open-ended social processes from which the work emerges. The notion of “risk connections,” proposed by Reinaldo Laddaga, provides a productive conceptual tool for understanding these works. Socioplastic lots and tag collages are unstable entities with porous edges, transforming through contact with other practices, contexts, and readings. They are objects-networks rather than discrete artworks, simultaneously autonomous and dependent on the relations they activate. This instability is not a deficit but a political and epistemological stance. By foregrounding precariousness, the work resists the rigidification of meaning characteristic of institutionalised narratives. Each lot proposes a topology of the space in which it was produced while remaining open to re-inscription elsewhere through circulation and documentation. The hyperlinked collage intensifies this condition by rendering explicit the logic of navigation: meaning is not given but traced, assembled through movement across signs. In this sense, the work operates as a metacritical apparatus, reflecting on its own conditions of production, representation, and reception.
Ultimately, the trajectory from socioplastic lot to relational tag collage articulates a coherent project of expanded representation. It seeks to account for the complexity of collective, process-based practices without reducing them to illustrative documentation. By operating as representations of representations—relations of relations—the works inscribe themselves within a semiological tradition of metarepresentation while remaining grounded in the material and social specificity of LAPIEZA. The emphasis on transportability, hyperlinkability, and narrative openness aligns these practices with broader critiques of authorship, spectatorship, and cultural fixity. Rather than offering a singular reading, they function as roadmaps among many possible ones, enabling new narratives to emerge through use. In doing so, they reaffirm relational art not as a style but as a methodological commitment: an ongoing negotiation of meaning enacted through fragile yet generative forms that bridge the physical and the virtual without subordinating one to the other (Lloveras, 2014).
Lloveras, A. (2014) Lotes socioplásticos. Available at: http://antolloveras.blogspot.com.es/2014/09/lotes-socioplasticos.html
Lloveras, A. (2015) Relational Tag Collages — Hipervínculos 266–300. Available at: https://antolloveras.blogspot.com/2015/02/relational-tag-collageshipervinculos.html
