Taxidermy III consolidates The City Is an Animal as a single, continuous exhibitionary body rather than a sequence of discrete projects. Presented in 2017 at Rigo Gallery and curated by Jerica Ziherl, the exhibition formalises a long durational action begun in earlier iterations in London and Spain. Here, the accumulation of 250 cuts—specifically Cuts 215 to 462—constitutes a dense urban skin harvested through walking, cutting, and carrying across cities, including Madrid. The city is no longer approached as context but as quarry. Street furniture, surfaces, and infrastructural residues are reclassified as meat, stripped of utility and reinserted into the gallery as a full-scale taxidermy. This gesture stabilises violence into form, producing an archive of contact between body, blade, and urban matter. The exhibition does not narrate the city; it dissects it, insisting on physical encounter as the primary mode of urban knowledge. The curatorial framing at Rigo Gallery is crucial. With two decades of international programming, the gallery functions less as a neutral container than as an epistemic amplifier. The main wall becomes a display plane for the urban carcass, while collateral works—clouds of fragments, situational fixers, and monochrome tools—extend the anatomy outward. The logic of taxidermy here is precise: preservation without illusion. Unlike traditional taxidermy, which simulates life, Taxidermy III preserves damage. The cuts are indexed, numbered, and geographically traced, aligning the work with forensic practices rather than sculptural composition. References to Lucio Fontana are operative rather than symbolic: the cut is real, irreversible, and ontologically destabilising. Yet the scale shifts from the pictorial to the civic. The exhibition thus proposes an ethics of surface, where urban modernity is understood as an accumulation of wounds rendered invisible by use.
TAXIDERMY__________III__________RIGO GALLERY_____________CROATIA _____________________2017
The extended actions—particularly the black-clad walks and cuts through Zagreb’s brutalist fabric—introduce temporality and movement as critical materials. These actions resist spectacle; they are repetitive, methodical, and largely undocumented except through residue. Video works such as Meat 215 and Meat 462 operate not as explanatory media but as parallel registers, translating the logic of cutting into time-based evidence. Across geographies—Mexico, France, Serbia—the insistence on “no leftovers” articulates a closed economy of extraction. Everything removed is accounted for. Nothing is symbolic surplus. This rigor situates the project within what the artist terms socioplastics: a transdisciplinary terrain where architecture, epistemology, and art converge. Here, the city is both material and theory, shaped and known through direct intervention rather than representation. In its totality, Taxidermy III is not an exhibition about destruction but about responsibility. To cut is to acknowledge resistance; to archive the cut is to refuse denial. Against urban discourse that abstracts cities into data, flows, or images, this work insists on weight, texture, and consequence. The gallery becomes a temporary morgue for urban matter, but also a site of care: the city-animal is skinned, named, and preserved so it can no longer be ignored. Back to Surface is therefore not a regression but a methodological demand. It calls for a return to what is touched, damaged, and shared. In doing so, Taxidermy III offers a severe but lucid proposition: the city is alive insofar as it can be wounded—and understood—through contact.
SITUATIONAL FIXERS______________UNSTABLE INSTALLATION SERIES_______________10X RIGO GALLERY
The City Is an Animal, presented at RIGO Gallery in 2017, frames Anto Lloveras’ Situational Fixers – Unstable Installation Series as a concise decalogue of urban conduct rather than a closed exhibition. The works do not accumulate meaning through narrative or spectacle; they operate through rules: use instead of possession, circulation instead of storage, disappearance instead of archive. The city is understood as a living organism whose intelligence lies in metabolism, not form. Art, consequently, behaves as a temporary organ—inserted, stressed, removed. Across No Credit Series, Fruitjob Ritual, Yellow Bag Classic, and the chromatic and sartorial sets, materials are treated as ethical units. Colour dots sourced from markets, watermelon as ritual matter, sand translated across oceans, or garments worn into institutional memory articulate a principle of non-surplus. Nothing is produced without consequence; nothing remains without having been used. The repeated insistence on “no leftovers” establishes a moral economy opposed to accumulation, authorship, and symbolic debt. These works do not represent value; they test it through exhaustion. The unstable installation functions as a short-form contract between body, object, and context. Stones from the Adriatic, tags, bags, hats, and shoes are activated through displacement and friction, not display. Even when elements enter the museum—such as the black shirt and pants now held in Zagreb—the work does not stabilise. Institutionalisation is treated as another phase of use, not as closure. Memory survives only as residue: video traces, worn surfaces, altered states.
THE CITY IS AN ANIMAL_____________________RIGO GALLERY
Lloveras, A. (2017a) Rigo Gallery: Context as Material. https://antolloveras.blogspot.com/2017/07/rigo-gallerycontext-as.html .Lloveras, A. (2017b) Taxidermy III — Rigo Gallery — Croatia — 2017. https://antolloveras.blogspot.com/2017/08/taxidermyiiirigo-gallerycroatia-2017.html. Lloveras, A. (2017c) Collateral Series / Translatorial. https://antolloveras.blogspot.com/2017/08/collateral-seriestrnslatoril.html
