Tuesday, January 27, 2026

LAPIEZA and the Architecture of Socioplastic Relationality * Unstable Forms and Collective Semiosis


LAPIEZA articulates a radical redefinition of artistic ontology by displacing the artwork from the realm of discrete, authorial objects into a mutable field of relations, signs, and collective operations. Conceived as an “unstable installation series” and a “symphony of expansive relationality,” the project positions itself as a living organism rather than a finite exhibition. Its defining gesture lies in the accumulation and simultaneity of heterogeneous artistic orders, whose combinatory logic generates LAPIEZA as a unified meta-work. This move situates the project within a lineage that extends from Constructivist synthesis and Fluxus processuality to Bourriaud’s relational aesthetics, while decisively departing from all three through its insistence on serial mutability and socioplastic form. Here, form is not the crystallisation of matter but the provisional configuration of relations. The installation is never complete; it mutates weekly through the addition of newly produced or live-generated works, often in the presence of a public. LAPIEZA thus operates as a durational artwork whose temporality is constitutive rather than incidental. In theoretical terms, it enacts a shift from representational aesthetics to operational aesthetics, in which the work functions as a protocol for the continuous production of meaning. The installation does not illustrate ideas; it engineers conditions under which ideas, encounters, and symbolic transfers can emerge. This architecture of indeterminacy situates LAPIEZA as a late-avant-garde formation, not predicated on negation or rupture, but on cumulative recomposition and relational density.


Central to this recompositional logic is LAPIEZA’s self-definition as a socioplastic project grounded in postproduction, semiotics, and what it terms “semionautics.” Objects are indeed produced, yet their primary function is not contemplative autonomy but symbolic mediation. Each piece operates as a node or “exchange station” between signs that were previously unconnected, thereby generating a transversal semiotic field. This conception echoes Nicolas Bourriaud’s notion of the artist as a navigator of signs, yet LAPIEZA radicalises the model by collectivising authorship and dispersing curatorial authority. Works are not labelled; the visitor confronts the installation as a single, continuous entity composed of multiple authorships. This deliberate effacement of individual attribution produces a productive estrangement, compelling the viewer to read the ensemble as a polyphonic text rather than a sequence of signatures. Meaning emerges through adjacency, interference, and resonance. The absence of didactic framing further intensifies this effect, transforming spectatorship into an act of semiotic labour. In this sense, LAPIEZA stages a pedagogy of perception in which viewers are trained to apprehend complexity without recourse to hierarchical classification. The socioplastic dimension is therefore not merely social in content but plastic in structure: it moulds the conditions of reception and interpretation. The project’s reliance on performance, process art, and direct action, alongside video, installation, drawing, and sculpture, produces a hybrid formal ecology that resists stylistic closure. What results is not a style but a sensibility: one oriented toward relational coherence rather than formal homogeneity.

The organisational structure of LAPIEZA further intensifies its theoretical stakes. Articulated through periodic “mutations,” the series establishes an alternative temporality of exhibition-making, one aligned with organic growth rather than institutional scheduling. This temporal plasticity is mirrored by the project’s open roster of participants. A core group of approximately fifteen artists—described as the “yeast” of LAPIEZA—coexists with a fluctuating constellation of invited contributors whose involvement is relational and floating. The heterogeneity of origins, legitimations, and career stages generates a dynamic field of tension between emergence and consecration. Established artists function as catalytic agents, while peripheral or unknown practitioners introduce vectors of unpredictability. This interplay activates what might be termed an economy of symbolic fermentation, in which difference is not merely tolerated but structurally necessary. The resulting installation language is complex, hybrid, and irreducible to any single genealogy. Crucially, the project refuses the stabilising function of orthodox curatorship; its architect, Anto Lloveras, explicitly disavows the curatorial role in favour of infrastructural authorship. This refusal signals a critical repositioning of power within the artistic field. LAPIEZA does not negate mediation; it redistributes it. Programming, монтаж, communication, and critique are folded into a single socioplastic continuum. The installation thus becomes an epistemic device: a machine for producing relations, narratives, and desires. It is precisely this machinic quality that aligns LAPIEZA with contemporary discourses on platform aesthetics and cultural ecologies.

The political and ethical implications of this ecology are foregrounded in LAPIEZA’s emphasis on accessibility, participation, and resistance to institutional elitism. By situating itself as an open, community-facing installation that evolves through public presence and interaction, the project enacts what Ernesto Laddaga has theorised as “cultural ecologies”: experimental forms of coexistence in which aesthetic production is inseparable from the organisation of social life. LAPIEZA does not merely represent alternative modes of being-together; it prototypes them. Its mutable accumulation of “junk art,” performative actions, and socioplastic interventions situates it within a genealogy of situacionist dérive and post-1968 countercultural practices, yet without nostalgic repetition. Instead, it retools these legacies for a post-digital, post-institutional condition. The installation’s capacity to generate “aesthetics of resistance” lies not in overt political messaging but in its reprogramming of artistic value. By privileging process over product, relation over object, and collectivity over authorship, LAPIEZA undermines the commodity logic of the contemporary art market. It offers, in its place, a model of art as a complex adaptive system, capable of generating emergent forms of meaning and sociality. This is not utopia, but infrastructural critique: a rigorous, materially grounded experiment in how art might inhabit the world otherwise. In this sense, LAPIEZA stands as one of the most coherent contemporary articulations of socioplastic art as both form and force 


UNSTABLE INSTALLATION SERIES — SINFONÍA RELACIONAL EXPANSIVA — Instalación inestable y dispersa 2009–2019. Available at: https://lapiezalapieza.blogspot.com/p/proximamente.html 


Semiosis is the continuous process through which meaning is produced, transformed, and circulated via signs. Coined in modern semiotics by Charles Sanders Peirce, the term designates not a fixed relation between a sign and its meaning, but an open, dynamic triad: sign – object – interpretant. Meaning is never final; each interpretation generates a new sign, extending the chain indefinitely. In contemporary art theory, semiosis names the shift from artworks as closed symbolic objects to artworks as semiotic engines—systems that activate interpretation, translation, and recombination. Meaning emerges relationally, through context, adjacency, and reception, rather than through intrinsic form alone. In the case of LAPIEZA, semiosis becomes collective and infrastructural. Each artwork functions less as an autonomous statement than as a node in a semiotic network, a relay point between previously disconnected signs, practices, and subjectivities. The installation as a whole operates as a field of ongoing semiosis, where meaning is continually re-authored by artists, visitors, spatial reconfigurations, and temporal mutations. Thus, semiosis here is not descriptive but operative: it is the very medium of the work. LAPIEZA does not represent meaning; it produces the conditions for meaning to happen. This situates the project within a post-conceptual paradigm where art is no longer a bearer of messages but a protocol for sign circulation, closer to a living language than to a finished object.





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