The project Protistas developed within the framework of LAPIEZA and articulated across sites such as Dunajská Streda, Nice, Poreč, and Trondheim, constitutes a decisive moment in the evolution of the Unstable Installation Series. Situated conceptually between minimalism, post-conceptual display, and socioplastic thinking, Protistas proposes a radical shift in scale and agency: from architectural totalities to particulate intelligence. The title itself—borrowed from biological taxonomy—signals an ontology of the fragment, the marginal, and the proto-form. Protists are neither plants nor animals; they occupy an indeterminate zone of life. Likewise, Lloveras’ installations resist categorical stability, operating instead as accumulations of residues, spreads, and micro-events. In Protistas, the exhibition space is not conceived as a container for objects but as an ecological field where fragments coexist without hierarchy. The work aligns with a lineage of minimal art that privileges reduction and seriality, yet it departs from its formalist legacy by foregrounding context, decay, and displacement as active components of meaning.
At the core of Protistas lies the strategy of the spread: objects are not composed but distributed, neither fixed nor resolved. Fragments—often industrial, domestic, or infrastructural—are collected, displaced, and re-presented as if they were samples in an open-ended taxonomy. This method echoes earlier experiments within the Unstable Series, yet here it becomes explicitly epistemological. The installation behaves like a field study rather than a sculpture, inviting the viewer to read relations rather than forms. In Dunajská Streda, as part of Duna Dunaj, the work absorbed the specificity of place—post-industrial atmospheres, peripheral geographies—without illustrating them. Instead, it registered their pressure through material choice and spatial rhythm. The same logic extended to subsequent iterations in Southern and Northern Europe, where climate, light, and architectural conditions subtly altered the constellation. Protistas thus functions as a mobile idiom: a language capable of mutating while retaining structural coherence.
The inclusion of Protistas within LAPIEZA’s Show #78 (ID 1023) situates the work within a broader curatorial ecology that foregrounds instability, friction, and counter-narrative. Alongside practices dealing with photourbanism, sound, performativity, and social excess, Protistas occupies a quieter yet structurally critical position. It does not shout; it accumulates. Its politics are not declarative but latent. By privileging fragments over wholes, the work articulates a critique of totalising systems—whether architectural, economic, or cultural. This critique resonates with contemporary discussions around entropy, ruin, and the afterlives of modernity. Yet unlike ruin aesthetics, Protistas avoids nostalgia. The fragments are not remnants of a lost order but active agents in a present process. They do not point backward; they circulate. In this sense, the work aligns with socioplastic logic: meaning emerges through relational density rather than symbolic representation.
Ultimately, Protistas proposes an ethics of attention attuned to the small, the unstable, and the unresolved. It suggests that contemporary spatial practice—whether artistic or architectural—must operate at the level of micro-adjustments rather than grand gestures. The spread object display becomes a pedagogical device, training perception to recognise value in marginalia. As the Unstable Series evolves, Protistas stands as a key inflection point where minimalism is retooled as ecological thinking and installation becomes a form of situated research. The work refuses closure, inviting continuous reconfiguration and re-reading. In an era marked by infrastructural exhaustion and epistemic overload, Protistas offers a counter-model grounded in slowness, fragmentation, and care. It reminds us that stability is not a prerequisite for meaning—and that sometimes, the most resilient structures are those that remain perpetually unfinished.
Lloveras, A. (2015) Protistas. Part of Duna Dunaj, Dunajská Streda, Slovakia. Available at: http://antolloveras.blogspot.sk/2015/09/duna-dunaj-slovakia-september-2015.html
LAPIEZA (2015) Protistas 924: Nice, Poreč, Trondheim – minimal Unstable Installation Series. Available at: https://lapiezalapieza.blogspot.com/2015/05/protistas-924-tomoto-nice-porec.html
Explore Further within the Socioplastic Network:
Blue Pants:
https://antolloveras.blogspot.com/2026/01/blue-pants-mobile-grammar-of-presence.html The Yellow Bag and the Architecture of Affection:
https://antolloveras.blogspot.com/2026/01/the-yellow-bag-and-architecture-of.html What Is The Word:
https://antolloveras.blogspot.com/2026/01/the-ontological-shift-translatorial-and.html
