The inaugural gesture of LAPIEZA—the lowercase letter e—condenses the project’s conceptual programme with remarkable precision. Recovered from an industrial fire and presented during EXIT, the first exhibition in 2009, the letter operates as both relic and index. It is not an image of catastrophe but a residue of it: scorched, incomplete, and mute. Installed for an entire year, the e resists spectacle and instead accumulates meaning through exposure and endurance. As documented in the video work e (2009–2014), the letter circulates through ruined interiors, domestic spaces, and acts of handling, becoming a mobile witness to collapse. Here, typography abandons its linguistic function to become sculptural evidence—language after damage.
This transformation of sign into matter situates LAPIEZA firmly within socioplastic thought. Objects are not valued for autonomy but for their capacity to connect previously isolated sign systems. The project’s declared interest in “posproduction of the significant object” and “semionautics” aligns it with practices that treat culture as a field of recombination rather than originality. Yet LAPIEZA departs from neutral remix by foregrounding affect, labour, and proximity. The installation is unstable and dispersed; it grows at a “naturalised speed” governed by artists’ desires and collectors’ demands. This negotiated temporality produces what critics have described as an “ecology of relations,” where estrangement and desire are activated by the coexistence of emerging and established artists within a shared frame.
-745286.jpg)
The sociopolitical dimension of LAPIEZA emerges not through explicit slogans but through its infrastructural ethics. By operating outside institutional mediation and embracing junk art, processual action, and direct performance, the project reclaims artistic agency for communities of practice. Its success—measured not by market validation but by sustained participation and wide dissemination—demonstrates an alternative economy of attention. The e, as the first and emblematic piece, embodies this ethos: minor, damaged, lowercase, yet foundational. It signals a commitment to working from what remains rather than what is produced anew. In doing so, LAPIEZA proposes a model of contemporary art as collective memory-work—an installation that does not stabilise meaning, but keeps it in circulation. LAPIEZA is a long-term contemporary art project articulated as an open, accumulative, and relational installation, initiated and sustained by Anto Lloveras. Conceived as a socioplastic structure, LAPIEZA does not function as a conventional exhibition space but as an artwork in itself—one that grows through weekly mutations, collective authorship, and temporal persistence. Its logic is additive and simultaneous: objects, performances, videos, drawings, and conversations coexist without labels, hierarchies, or didactic mediation. The visitor encounters a single, continuous work composed of heterogeneous contributions. This refusal of segmentation situates LAPIEZA within post-Bourriaud relational practices, while extending them into a durational ecology where time becomes a primary material and curating operates as a form of writing across years.
Quoted audiovisual sources (contextual reference)
– e (video art), documents the recovery and circulation of the letter after industrial collapse, presented within the first LAPIEZA exhibition (EXIT, 2009).
– LAPIEZA Art Series playlist, documents the evolving socioplastic installation across time.
Lloveras, A., 2011. LAPIEZA #01 EXIT. [online] LAPIEZA Blog. Available at: https://lapiezalapieza.blogspot.com/search/label/01%20EXIT
Lloveras, A., 2009–2014. e. [video] Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RCymRG4zUqM
Explore Further within the Socioplastic Network:
The Rhizomatic Vanguard:
Sinuous Architectures and the Vertiginous Lot:
The Trole Building:
