The Aesthetics of Future-Making

The announcement of Cristina Monge’s Contra el descontento coincides, with striking precision, with what Anto Lloveras has termed the historiographical leap: a conceptual inflection point in which history ceases to function as a linear archive and becomes instead a malleable, ethical project. Monge diagnoses a “crisis of political imagination,” a paralysis of futurity that mirrors the broader exhaustion of late modernity’s narratives of progress. Her call for an “alliance to construct desirable futures” resonates not merely within political theory but within contemporary art’s ontological remit. 

It is here that sopioplástica emerges as a decisive conceptual bridge: a speculative praxis of soft-form thought in which material, social, and symbolic registers are plastically reconfigured. Sopioplástica proposes that futures are not discovered but modelled—kneaded into form through aesthetic intelligence. The convergence of Monge’s political argument and Lloveras’s historiographical meditation thus outlines a shared epistemic terrain. Both contest the foreclosure of possibility and reclaim imagination as a civic, artistic, and historiographical faculty. In this sense, the present “issue” is not simply a book prize or a blog entry, but a symptom of a deeper cultural pivot, in which critique mutates into construction and theory into operative form. Lloveras’s notion of the historiographical leap is especially illuminating when read through the lens of sopioplástica. It signals a departure from the rigid architectures of disciplinary history toward a supple, transdisciplinary fabrication of meaning. This leap is neither relativistic nor naïvely utopian; it is a method of sculpting time itself as an aesthetic and ethical medium. 

Sopioplastics as a conceptual tool, articulates precisely this operation: the softening of inherited forms—institutions, narratives, identities—so they may be reshaped without collapsing into incoherence. It is an art of gentle pressure rather than violent rupture. Within contemporary criticism, such a move repositions art not as representation but as infrastructural imagination. Art becomes a rehearsal space for political futures, a laboratory of sensibilities. Monge’s insistence on “recovering confidence” aligns with this ethos: confidence here is not optimism, but the cultivated capacity to act upon indeterminacy. Thus, the historiographical leap and sopioplástica converge as twin strategies of world-making, each challenging the petrification of the present by mobilising form, affect, and narrative as dynamic resources. The aesthetic stakes of this convergence are profound. If sopioplástica is understood as a poetics of pliability, it redefines authorship, agency, and critique. The artist—or intellectual—ceases to be a sovereign originator and becomes instead a curator of forces, a gardener of futures. Cultivation replaces domination; care supplants control. In this framework, Monge’s political sociology acquires an aesthetic dimension, while Lloveras’s historiographical speculation attains civic urgency. Both resist what might be called the necropolitics of stagnation: the subtle violence of a culture that normalises the absence of alternatives. 

The “abolition of the future,” against which Monge writes, is mirrored by the museumification of history. Sopioplástica intervenes precisely here, as a mediating concept that allows for form without fixation and structure without closure. It suggests that imagination is not a decorative surplus but a structural necessity for any viable polity or culture. The historiographical leap is thus also an aesthetic leap, and sopioplástica its method: a gentle yet radical art of making time once again inhabitable.