The decision to activate "Hidden Forces" in the dunes of Cádiz stems from a need to confront the friction between residual urbanism and the shifting ecology of the Atlantic coast. Writing from a position that views the landscape not as a static backdrop but as a distributed agency, I see this work as a necessary intervention in an era of saturated visibility. We occupy a moment where human impact is everywhere, yet often remains unexamined in its aesthetic debris. These concrete ruins, remnants of coastal defense or failed infrastructure now scarred by graffiti, represent a social and ecological impasse. By addressing these sites now, the project moves beyond mere documentation. It occupies a conceptual space where the "urban" bleeds into the "wild," forcing a mode of attention that recognizes how human traces are being continuously reabsorbed by the environment’s own systemic pressures.
The operational logic of the project is one of precise erasure and formal replacement. Using solid black rectangles, the process systematically conceals existing graffiti—vibrant, chaotic, and ego-driven—with the heavy, silent weight of Suprematist geometry. This is not a decorative addition but a material investigation into the "non-objective." The medium is a matte black pigment applied directly to the weathered concrete, creating a void-like structure that absorbs light amidst the high-contrast glare of the sand. The sequence is rhythmic: locate a site of human "noise," isolate the concrete substrate, and apply the geometric block. This transformation functions as a visual filter, stripping away the narrative of the tag to reveal the starkness of the volume. It is a functional system of censorship that turns a cluttered urban relic into a minimalist landmark, momentarily stabilizing the visual field against the restless movement of the dunes. This intervention finds its scaffolding in the radical reduction of Kazimir Malevich, whose pursuit of "the supremacy of pure feeling" is here tested against the physical resistance of the elements. While Malevich sought a cosmic infinity, "Hidden Forces" grounds this pursuit in the "molecular" or "process-oriented" thinking of practitioners like Robert Smithson. By placing these absolute shapes in a state of entropy, the work addresses the "distributed agency" discussed by Jane Bennett; the sand and wind are not passive observers but active participants in the work’s degradation. The black rectangle becomes a problematic object—a "dark ecology" in Timothy Morton’s terms—that highlights our inability to exist apart from the environments we modify. The curatorial method here is not to preserve the art, but to manage a dialogue where the material logic of the landscape eventually overpowers the intellectual logic of the artist.
The project does not end at the shoreline; it is designed for media drift and territorial mutation. Captured in a 60-second loop, the work enters a digital timescale where the "hidden" becomes hyper-visible through the screen. As the physical black blocks are eroded by salt and burial, the project mutates into a series of archival signals, moving through blogs and video platforms. This drift allows the work to be re-situated in different urban contexts as a ghostly reference to what was once "there." It suggests a trajectory where the land art piece is merely the first state of a larger, shifting body of data. The project moves from heavy matter—concrete and pigment—to light information, mirroring the very impermanence it celebrates. These markings, though static in form, are mobile in essence, drifting from the physical Cádiz dunes into a global network of conceptual investigations. "Hidden Forces" serves as an operative opening for future investigations into how we negotiate the "no-man’s-land" of coastal ruins. It suggests a shift in attention from the act of "making" to the act of "un-making," proposing a method of curatorial subtraction that could be applied to other saturated environments. What happens when we apply this geometric silence to the debris of the digital city or the ruins of industrial hinterlands? This work makes possible a new relation with the landscape based on "revelatory concealment," where the goal is no longer to leave a permanent mark, but to facilitate a graceful exit. It is a launchpad for practices that embrace the ephemeral as a position of strength, inviting us to design interventions that are prepared to vanish, leaving behind only a sharpened awareness of the forces—hidden and visible—that shape our world.
ANTO LLOVERAS
SOCIOPLASTICS
https://antolloveras.blogspot.com/2026/01/suprematism-trafalgar-cadiz.html
