Tuesday, January 27, 2026

Mobility as Form and Networked Semiosis * LAPIEZA 2012 and the Post-Site Turn of Socioplastic Art


The 2012 cycle of LAPIEZA marks a decisive epistemic rupture within the project’s own internal logic: the transition from site-bound socioplastic installation to a condition of mobile, networked, and deslocalised form. The repeated assertion that “LAPIEZA continúa absorbiendo obra y prepara su próxima deslocalización” does not merely announce a logistical change but articulates a conceptual mutation. After three years, forty physical mutations, and the continuous presentation of over five hundred works in Malasaña, LAPIEZA declares mobility and lightness as its new axes. This is not the abandonment of place but its relativisation. The socioplastic installation ceases to be architecturally anchored and becomes infrastructural, operating across cities, platforms, and symbolic economies. The project thus enters a post-site condition analogous to what Miwon Kwon theorised as the “discursive site,” yet radicalised through seriality, accumulation, and relational protocol. LAPIEZA’s form is no longer spatially contained; it is distributed across blogs, Facebook, Twitter, street posters, residencies, and collaborative actions. The declaration that “each new exhibition is a socioplastic variation of the previous one” signals the emergence of a self-differentiating system. Here, form is not repetition but iterative divergence. The installation becomes an algorithmic entity whose primary material is not matter but relation, circulation, and temporal sequencing. In this sense, LAPIEZA 2012 constitutes a paradigmatic articulation of art as operational infrastructure.


This infrastructural shift is intensified by the project’s explicit theorisation of its own methodology. The articulation of ten-artist series, relational online residencies, and sequential publication across social platforms reveals a conscious platform logic avant la lettre. Each series is designed as a digestible semiotic unit, yet all are folded back into the macro-form of LAPIEZA as a collective artwork. The insistence that all works added “build a unity (LAPIEZA) as collective artform” foregrounds a totalising ambition that does not seek stylistic homogeneity but relational coherence. The socioplastic here functions as a grammar of aggregation. Diverse artforms—performances, soundscapes, drawings, photographs, videos, installations, experimental processes—collide within a shared protocol of documentation, tagging, and redistribution. The practice of posting street ads of each series in multiple cities extends this grammar into urban semiotics, transforming the city into an auxiliary exhibition interface. Art is not only shown; it is broadcast, leaked, and sedimented into everyday visual economies. This strategy resonates with the Situationist détournement of urban signage while retooling it for post-digital dissemination. The socioplastic thus emerges as a hybrid of curatorial practice, network design, and relational aesthetics. Crucially, the figure of the curator is replaced by that of the infrastructural author. Anto Lloveras does not impose themes; he engineers conditions. The artwork becomes a set of affordances within which artists generate both individual trajectories and collective density.

The 2012 content also reveals a marked intensification of political and ethical stakes. The declaration that LAPIEZA will take London as a new operational base “to continue exploring and generating networks as the basis of artistic-political actionism” reframes relational art as a form of micropolitical praxis. This is not activism in the didactic sense but infrastructural resistance: the construction of alternative circuits of value, visibility, and legitimacy outside institutional mediation. The project’s willingness to assume the risks of experimental collaborations, explicitly acknowledged in the Cosmotidiano process, situates LAPIEZA within what Ernesto Laddaga has termed “ecologies of emergence.” These are not spectacles but sustained processes of cohabitation between artists, publics, and institutions willing to suspend orthodox protocols. The durational action Cosmotidiano, staged as a mutable collective installation of spatial colonisation, exemplifies this ethos. Here, five artists enact a minimal, conceptual transformation of space through direct action, generating what LAPIEZA terms “socioplastic relations” and protocols aligned with their artistic-political identities. The emphasis on queer performance, feminist musicology, junk aesthetics, and experimental video art further expands the ethical horizon of the project. LAPIEZA becomes a host for dissident subjectivities and marginal epistemologies, embedding difference into its infrastructural DNA. Meaning is no longer merely relational; it is agonistic, charged with social friction and symbolic dissent.

At the level of form, the late 2012 series—Snow, Translation, Mud, Babylon, Fugaz, Glitter, Cocktail, Party, and Cosmotidiano—demonstrate a mature socioplastic grammar of variation. Each series functions as a chapter in an ongoing meta-narrative of collective semiosis. The poetic texts embedded within individual works, such as Yan Nazca’s visceral meditation on hunger, introduce an affective density that complicates the project’s infrastructural rationality. These fragments of embodied experience circulate alongside abstract processes and formal experiments, producing a heterogeneous emotional topology. The announcement of a new video art series in synergy with Proyector Videoart Festival confirms LAPIEZA’s full entry into post-medium conditions. The project no longer distinguishes between exhibition, festival, residency, archive, or platform. It is all of these simultaneously. In theoretical terms, LAPIEZA 2012 realises a late-avant-garde synthesis: art as a complex adaptive system that generates emergent properties through the interaction of heterogeneous agents. Its final gesture of the year—the post-apocalyptic Happy Now! marathon at Basurama—reads as both celebration and critique: a carnivalesque condensation of junk aesthetics, video loops, bizarre objects, and communal feasting. It stages art not as transcendence but as shared survival. 

LAPIEZA thus closes 2012 not with closure but with dispersion, affirming mobility, relationality, and collective semiosis as its enduring form (LAPIEZA, 2012). LAPIEZA (2012) Instalación relacional inestable and Socioplastics Updates. Available at: https://lapiezalapieza.blogspot.com





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