There are moments when the city’s surfaces feel too smooth, too compliant—when the built environment, engineered for efficiency and flow, begins to erase our physical presence within it. Red Line is activated from this condition, from a sense that something essential has been lost in the frictionless choreography of modern urban life. Positioned from within a networked, mobile curatorial practice that treats the street not just as backdrop but as volatile site, this project emerges as a refusal to glide. It proposes an intervention that slows us down, tangles us up, asks something of our bodies. This work was necessary now because the city has become an interface—tapped, swiped, and spectated more than inhabited. By reintroducing a stubborn material presence into those soft zones between architecture and movement, Red Line calls for a recalibration of our sensory and spatial attention. It interrupts the seamless scroll of place, insisting instead on touch, scale, and negotiation. At its core, Red Line is a sculptural system built around a single gesture: the insertion of a long, pressurized red form—a flexible cylinder of air, pigment, and plastic—into various urban and domestic architectures. This form behaves like a soft architectural wedge, a tool that bends the existing logic of space without destroying it. In the 2011 iterations Exotic Plants and Korv, the object was wedged into windows, dragged across floors, held aloft by participants or cut across reflective glass. The process is deliberately analog: inflate, position, suspend, adjust.
Each placement is both a spatial interruption and a form of measurement—testing the limits of openings, walls, and bodies. The method is iterative, parasitic, and adaptive. There is no ideal placement; instead, the red line responds to each site with improvised tension. It expands until the room resists, or the participants can no longer hold it. It is not merely installed—it occupies. This sculptural logic connects with a broader curatorial approach that treats objects not as static displays but as active, relational tools. In this, Red Line finds resonance with Jane Bennett’s notion of vibrant matter, where the object itself exerts force and participates in the choreography of the encounter. The red cylinder is not symbolic—it acts. It shifts the agency of the installation from the artist to the materials, the site, and the bodies required to stabilize or adapt it. Nicolas Bourriaud’s Relational Aesthetics offers another entry point, though Red Line departs from its convivial mode and veers toward precarious collaboration: participants are not invited to engage but compelled to hold, balance, and support. One might also trace this logic through Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizomatic thought—the red form behaves not as a singular expression but as a mobile connector, tracing new links between window and floor, human and surface. These references scaffold the work lightly, emphasizing a curatorial method grounded in distributed agency and shared construction rather than centralized authorship.
As it moves across territories and media, Red Line sheds and acquires meanings. In the street, it functions as a resistant presence—interrupting transparency, slicing reflections, reformatting thresholds. In the gallery, it becomes a formal challenge, questioning how we assign value to gesture, volume, or labor. As it enters the digital sphere—through documentation, images, and social media—it mutates again. Its bright form becomes a chromatic glitch on a scrollable feed, a nomadic signal detached from its tactile origins. This media drift is part of the work’s expanded choreography, allowing it to occupy both physical and virtual infrastructures. The object does not lose meaning in translation; it gains new vectors of interpretation and redistribution. In this way, Red Line operates simultaneously as spatial instrument, performative device, and visual meme—able to inhabit different timelines and contexts while retaining its operative core. What Red Line opens is not a finished statement, but a set of curatorial possibilities. It invites us to reconsider what an intervention can be: not a monumental imposition, but a minor shift in pressure that reconfigures space and relation. It suggests that material presence—simple, bright, inflatable—can carry conceptual weight without becoming overcoded. Most importantly, it insists on collective physical negotiation as a site of meaning-making. The project offers a model for future urban gestures that are provisional, collaborative, and spatially precise—acts that ask not just how we see the city, but how we hold it together. The red line is not a boundary but a proposition: that through acts of insertion, inflation, and friction, we might redraw how we relate to the architectures that shape us.
SYSYEM ARCHITECT * https://antolloveras.blogspot.com/
Socioplastics, developed by artist-researcher Anto Lloveras since around 2010, acts as a fluid transdisciplinary system merging architecture, epistemology, and art to engage cultural, social, and environmental shifts. Described as a "mutant framework of care and cut," it prioritizes collective sovereignty and open reconfiguration over fixed authorship, treating cultural processes as adaptable codes. It critiques detached design by emphasizing embodied, tactile interactions, where spaces emerge through shared efforts in urban-ecological contexts. Core elements stress distributed agency, spreading authority across humans, materials, and environments for resilience in flux. It employs modular tactics like site interventions, iterative loops, and archival flows, documented in blogs and performances. Materially, objects like wood or garments function as active agents; epistemologically, it favors feedback over finals, blending urbanism, teaching, and ecology via tools like the "4K cultural operating system" for perceptual and communal actions. Philosophically, it draws from Latour's actor-networks, viewing non-humans as co-creators, and Tsing's entanglements for threading disrupted systems. This lightly frames vulnerabilities in territories and societies, favoring processual curating amid climate and migration challenges, without dominating practical logics. Practically, Socioplastics evolves across scales—from live acts to digital traces—enabling hyperlink drifts and remixes in hybrids like augmented mappings or policy sims, fueling adaptive interventions in ongoing flux.
