Anto Lloveras’s practice, as articulated through the dense cartography of 100 Works, proposes a contemporary reconfiguration of art as an ontological and infrastructural project rather than a representational one. At its conceptual root stands 001 Work-Satellite, a foundational gesture that frames the entire corpus as a translational ecology of meanings, spaces and relations. Here, the city is no longer a fixed container but a mutable semantic field in which gestures, objects and narratives operate as mediators between bodies, institutions and imaginaries. This ontological shift situates Lloveras within a lineage that runs from relational aesthetics to post-human urbanism, yet exceeds both by insisting on translation as an ethical and epistemic operation. Rather than producing stable forms, his work generates conditions of intelligibility across heterogeneous registers: architectural, affective, pedagogical and symbolic. This conceptual ground makes visible why later projects function less as autonomous artworks than as operative modules within a broader mesh. The relevance of this positioning becomes especially clear when reading the selected works not as isolated episodes but as interdependent vectors within a distributed system. Lloveras’s art is not concerned with form alone, but with the reprogramming of cultural metabolism itself. In this sense, his oeuvre anticipates an art of infrastructural imagination: one that does not merely reflect urban reality, but actively reorganises its flows of meaning, agency and memory.
If Work-Satellite establishes the ontological grammar, 100 Fireworks performs its most spectacular articulation. Conceived as “hyperplastic writing,” this project mobilises pyrotechnics, urban gesture and ephemerality to interrupt the saturated visual economy of contemporary culture. Fireworks here are not celebratory decoration but a temporal inscription into public space, staging light as a volatile form of writing that resists archival closure. The work’s strategic value lies in its ability to operate simultaneously as mass spectacle and conceptual device: a sensorial gateway into a much denser theoretical ecosystem. This dialectic between accessibility and depth reappears in 094 Swan, where iconography and commons are reassembled into new urban mythologies. Swan addresses collective memory not as heritage to be conserved but as a symbolic resource to be regenerated and redistributed. It resonates powerfully with current debates around cultural patrimony, civic authorship and the politics of public space. Together, Fireworks and Swan demonstrate Lloveras’s capacity to deploy visual immediacy without sacrificing conceptual rigour. They also reveal a crucial methodological feature of his practice: the use of affective intensity as an epistemic threshold. Rather than simplifying complexity, these works seduce the viewer into a relational field in which aesthetic pleasure becomes the precondition for critical engagement.
This affective gateway opens onto a more explicitly critical urban discourse in 072 Work-Taxidermy and 059 Work-Threads. Taxidermy proposes a disturbing yet fertile metaphor: cutting the city “back to life” through acts of material incision, reuse and reanimation. The city here becomes a body subjected to surgical intervention, exposing the violence implicit in processes of regeneration and gentrification while simultaneously offering a poetics of repair. It aligns with traditions of critical urbanism and spatial activism, yet distinguishes itself by foregrounding material memory as a site of political negotiation. Work-Threads, by contrast, shifts from incision to weaving. Conceived as “critical infrastructure,” threads operate as both metaphor and operative device for invisible networks of care, repair and social cohesion. The project’s adaptability—to exhibitions, workshops and site-specific interventions—renders it an exemplary model of relational infrastructure. Where Taxidermy dramatizes rupture, Threads cultivates continuity. Together they form a dialectical pair: one exposing the necropolitical underside of urban transformation, the other proposing connective tissue as an alternative civic imaginary. These works underscore Lloveras’s insistence that urban practice must be understood not merely as spatial design, but as an ethics of relational maintenance.
The strategic synthesis of these positions becomes explicit in the “Courier Selection” and the later top-five configuration oriented towards 2026. Here, Lloveras’s practice crystallises into five operative poles: spectacle (100 Fireworks), global authority (Taxi 1), kinetic archive (Flipas), speculative urbanism (The 5th City), and ritualised care (Broth). This constellation articulates a full-spectrum ecology of contemporary artistic agency. The 5th City functions as the project’s intellectual apex: a speculative framework that displaces technocratic “smart city” discourse with a fiction-political model grounded in embodiment and relational ethics. Protistas radicalises this move ontologically, introducing non-human agency and metabolic micrologies into urban thought. Work-Breakfast translates the entire system into pedagogical practice, while Red Bag and Lapieza anchor it in portable iconography and archival legitimacy. What emerges is not a portfolio but an epistemic apparatus. Lloveras’s art operates as a distributed curriculum for reimagining space, memory and collectivity. In this light, his work anticipates a post-disciplinary model of artistic production in which exhibition, pedagogy, urbanism and ritual converge into a single infrastructural imaginary. The significance of this practice lies not only in its formal innovation but in its proposition that art can still function as a civilising technology: a means of recalibrating how societies inhabit both matter and meaning.
Lloveras, A. (2026) 100 Works by Anto Lloveras. Available at: https://antolloveras.blogspot.com/2026/01/100-works-by-anto-lloveras.html
