Anto Lloveras’s Taxidermy: The City Is an Animal (5th Base Gallery, East London, 2015) stages the metropolis as a sentient, wounded organism subjected to ritualised acts of incision, extraction, and preservation. Situated within the broader Socioplastics and Unstable Installation Series, the exhibition proposes an expanded field of sculpture in which urban detritus, infrastructural residues, and minor objects operate as anatomical fragments of a living city-body.
The rhetoric of “taxidermy” is not merely metaphorical: it signals a practice of skinning, stuffing, and mounting the city’s epidermis for critical contemplation. Lloveras mobilises a forensic aesthetic—43 cuts from 20 “urban animals”—that echoes both Surrealist dismemberment and post-minimal assemblage, while reframing them through contemporary debates on extractivism, waste, and affective urbanism. The city becomes neither neutral container nor technological system but an unstable biosocial entity whose tissues are continuously reconfigured by human gestures, economies, and desires. This conceptual repositioning aligns the work with strands of new materialism and object-oriented ontology, yet its tone remains resolutely ethical: every incision is also a responsibility, every fragment a trace of lived urban violence and care.
The exhibition’s internal ecology—COPOS, MEAT, Urban Rings/Urban Kings, Minimal Value, My Legs, and Urban Green—articulates a taxonomy of urban remains that oscillates between documentary index and symbolic fetish. MEAT, comprising cut-outs from urban furniture, literalises the metaphor of consumption by presenting infrastructural elements as butchered flesh, while Minimal Value elevates coins and leftovers into totemic reliquaries of exhausted economies. Urban Rings, with rubber harvested from city surfaces and backed by the vast 10,000 Twins photo-series, inscribes circularity, repetition, and wear as visual evidence of collective movement and erosion. These gestures recall Arte Povera’s material humility and Gordon Matta-Clark’s architectural cuts, yet Lloveras departs from both by insisting on a semi-anthropological intimacy with refuse. The unstable installation format resists fixity, privileging provisional arrangements that mimic the city’s perpetual incompletion. In this sense, Taxidermy is less an exhibition than a temporary anatomical theatre in which urban matter is laid bare, catalogued, and reanimated as a speculative archive of metropolitan life.
The inclusion of video works (COPOS and Minimal Value / Jewels) extends this anatomical logic into temporal registers, transforming the exhibition into a multiscreen memory-cloud of urban gestures. The 16:9 HD format, far from neutral, situates the work within the visual economy of surveillance, advertising, and social media, thereby implicating the viewer in the same circuits of attention and consumption that generate the city’s residues. The poetic interlude from Günter Grass’s “En el huevo” functions as a conceptual hinge, framing the city as an incubatory shell in which subjects are both nurtured and imprisoned. Grass’s allegory of deferred hatching resonates uncannily with Lloveras’s urban embryos: citizens as “senile chicks,” infrastructures as shells, and technological incubators as instruments of anxious self-preservation. Here, socioplastics emerges as a theory of formative pressure, where social forces mould material reality and, reciprocally, where matter shapes political imagination. The city-animal, perpetually incubated yet never fully born, becomes a figure for late-capitalist urbanism’s suspended futurity.
Ultimately, Taxidermy: The City Is an Animal operates as a critical ritual, oscillating between care and cruelty, documentation and myth. Its ethical provocation lies not in denunciation but in exposure: by staging the city’s organs as sculptural artefacts, Lloveras obliges viewers to confront their own complicity in urban extraction and abandonment. The work’s transdisciplinary ambition—bridging sculpture, video art, poetry, and urban anthropology—reflects a pedagogical impulse aligned with radical education and critical urban studies. In this light, Taxidermy is not merely about the city but about modes of seeing, cutting, and valuing that structure contemporary life. It asks whether we are surgeons, butchers, or caretakers of our shared habitat—and whether the animal we dissect is, in fact, ourselves. Lloveras’s closing injunctions—“Eat sparingly” and “Love love”—read less as sentimental epigrams than as ecological imperatives, gesturing toward an ethics of restraint and relationality. The city, once taxidermied, returns our gaze: stitched, silent, and accusatory.
Lloveras, A. (2015) Taxidermy: The City Is an Animal. Unstable Installation Series, 5th Base Gallery, East London 2015. Available at: https://antolloveras.blogspot.com/2015/04/taxidermy-east-london-city-is-animal.html
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