The 2013 cycle of LAPIEZA constitutes the project’s most explicit articulation of socioplasticity as a transnational, post-site, and interoceanic form of cultural production. With the declaration that new series are edited from Mexico City and that the relational concept now operates as a “dispersed installation,” LAPIEZA completes its passage from a neighbourhood-based experimental ecology into a globally distributed aesthetic infrastructure. The announced Madrid–Mexico axis does not function as a mere logistical coordination between two cities but as a symbolic and operational reorientation of the project’s ontology. LAPIEZA no longer inhabits a space; it inhabits a network. This networked condition, explicitly framed as “interoceanic production,” positions the project within a post-globalisation paradigm of art, in which mobility, translation, and asynchronous collaboration become constitutive formal elements. The socioplastic installation ceases to be spatially anchored and becomes a cartography of relations, affects, and symbolic flows. In this sense, LAPIEZA 2013 realises what might be termed a late-avant-garde synthesis between relational aesthetics, platform logic, and discursive site-specificity. The project’s self-description as an activity dedicated to establishing new connections and meanings between signs—ideas, graphics, works, and artists—confirms that semiosis has become its primary medium. The artwork is no longer the object, nor even the installation, but the continuous recomposition of signifying relations across territories, languages, and cultural economies.
This recomposition is materially instantiated in the structure of the 2013 series, whose titles—Deseo, Vulcano, System, Kiss, Snow, Translation, Mud, and Babylon—function less as thematic labels than as poetic operators within a meta-narrative of collective semiosis. Each series aggregates works by geographically dispersed artists, whose practices collide within a shared socioplastic protocol. The insistence that each new series incorporates ten artists and that each exhibition is a socioplastic variation of the previous one reveals a fully matured grammar of iterative difference. What emerges is not a linear archive but a recursive system, in which each addition retroactively reconfigures the meaning of the whole. The project’s methodology of sequential online publication across blogs, Facebook, Twitter, and Issuu further intensifies this recursive logic. Visibility itself becomes a formal dimension of the work. The practice of posting street ads of each series in cities where artists work extends the socioplastic field into urban semiotics, transforming public space into a distributed exhibition interface. Here, LAPIEZA resonates with Situationist strategies of détournement and dérive, yet reframes them within a post-digital ecology of feeds, hyperlinks, and platform circulation. The installation thus becomes a hybrid of archive, exhibition, and broadcast channel. It is not merely shown; it is streamed into everyday perceptual economies.
The Mexico City phase introduces a new layer of symbolic density into LAPIEZA’s socioplastic grammar. The series edited from Mexico are marked by an intensified poetic and affective charge, evident in works such as Yan Nazca’s La presencia de Leviatán and Poemas de la luz, whose visceral textuality embeds hunger, memory, and urban decay into the project’s semiotic bloodstream. These fragments of embodied experience circulate alongside minimalist installations, hyperplastic urban videos, and expanded sculptures, producing a heterogeneous emotional topology. LAPIEZA thus becomes an affective archive as much as a formal one. The inclusion of projects such as Maite Cajaraville’s Raza, developed in collaboration with the Museo Mural Diego Rivera and the Centro Cultural de España en México, signals a strategic engagement with institutional contexts without surrendering infrastructural autonomy. The socioplastic here functions as a diplomatic protocol, capable of negotiating between independent experimentation and public cultural frameworks. The articulation of Unstable and Copos as cartographies of emotional dérive through cities further consolidates LAPIEZA’s post-site condition. Urban wandering becomes a method of aesthetic research, producing what Rubén Bonet aptly terms a “cartografía emocional fotográfica.” The city is no longer a backdrop but a semiotic quarry, mined for residues of everyday magic and affective intensity.
At the level of authorship and value, LAPIEZA 2013 radicalises its earlier experiments in collective identity. The enumeration of hundreds of works and artists no longer functions as documentation but as a performative assertion of scale. The project explicitly declares itself a portal that houses more than one hundred artists from multiple countries, foregrounding diversity not as a curatorial theme but as a structural necessity. The invitation to artists, collectors, and lovers of art to participate in the mounting of new series collapses the boundary between production, reception, and legitimation. The emergence of socioplastic sculptures, relational frames, and hyperlinked catalogues formalises this redistribution of value into hybrid collectible forms that resist singular authorship. LAPIEZA thus operates as a counter-institution: not through negation, but through infrastructural substitution. Its embrace of video art festivals, queer performance at the Museo Reina Sofía, and collaborative sound archives further confirms its post-medium condition. The project no longer distinguishes between exhibition, residency, festival, archive, or platform. It is all of these simultaneously. In theoretical terms, LAPIEZA 2013 realises a fully operational model of art as a complex adaptive system, capable of generating emergent properties through the interaction of heterogeneous agents distributed across continents. Its socioplastic form no longer belongs to Madrid, Mexico, or the internet; it belongs to the relational field it continuously produces.
In this sense, LAPIEZA stands as one of the most coherent contemporary articulations of a dispersed, networked avant-garde, in which mobility, semiosis, and collective authorship converge as both form and force (LAPIEZA, 2013). LAPIEZA (2013) Instalación relacional dispersa and Socioplastics Updates. Available at: https://lapiezalapieza.blogspot.com
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