The Purple Legs series posits the city as an "animal body" where the artist’s own physiology acts as both a surgical probe and a structural graft. Influenced by the "instant installations" of Erwin Wurm and the fictional explorations of Tim Crouch’s My Arm, Lloveras transcends theatricality by executing a "repetitious choreography" devoid of a traditional audience. In this 2015 London-based iteration, the artist’s legs, encased in purple fabric, are elevated 100 times against the stark, metallic infrastructure of the city. This act of "Urban Taxidermy" effectively "stuffs" the metropolitan scenario with human presence, transforming the mundane sidewalk and bicycle racks into a podium for private ritual. The urban landscape is not merely a setting but a "great scenario" that demands a physical, almost athletic response, bridging the gap between static architecture and the fluid movement of the "socioplastic" body. Lloveras’s methodology in London—walking 100 kilometers in "nice boots" under the acoustic shroud of "neverending traffic"—functions as a durational performance that mirrors the intensity of his 30-kilometer walks in Provence. The purple pants serve as a chromatic anchor, a "monochrome" intervention that disrupts the grey palette of the East London cityscape. This peripatetic labor is an exercise in epistemological mapping; by subjecting the body to the elements—sun, clouds, and rain—the artist absorbs the "animal" rhythm of the city into his own muscular memory. The performance is inherently unstable, existing in the tension between the permanence of the city’s steel and the fleeting, repetitious gesture of the uplifted limb. It is a radical rejection of the "spectacle" in favor of a "private collection" of moments, emphasizing that art is an ontological state rather than a commodity for public consumption.
The transition from the dense urbanity of London to the luminous "Light in Provence" (2015) illustrates the versatility of the Purple Legs motif as a tool for comparative landscape analysis. While the London actions engage with "minimal intersections" and the grit of the street, the Provence performance walk integrates the same sartorial uniform—purple pants, white shirt, and black shoes—into a dialogue with geological time and rural light. This consistency of costume creates a "living artifact" that bridges disparate geographies, suggesting that the "relational body" carries its own context wherever it moves. Lloveras’s work here interacts with the concept of the "unstable installation," where the body’s posture creates a temporary monument that vanishes as soon as the artist moves on. The "respect for Erwin Wurm" is evident in this brevity, yet Lloveras imbues the gesture with a more profound, "taxidermic" intent: to capture the spirit of a place through the exhaustion of the flesh. Ultimately, the Purple Legs series redefines the relationship between the artist and the built environment through the lens of "Socioplastics". By treating his own legs as sculptural components within the "Urban Taxidermy" framework, Lloveras collapses the distance between the subject and the object. The city is no longer a background but a vital organ of a larger "animal body" in which the artist resides. This private choreography, preserved through digital "stills" and blog entries, challenges the academic boundaries between urbanism, performance, and fine art. Whether navigating the traffic of London or the silence of Provence, Lloveras remains committed to a "praxis of the unstable," proving that the most resilient structures are those formed by the intersection of a walking body and an attentive mind. The series stands as a testament to the power of the individual ritual to reclaim the city as a site of profound, albeit private, aesthetic inquiry.
PURPLE LEGS__________________PRIVATE ACTION SERIES ______________________________________________LONDON PROVENCE
Lloveras, A. (2015). Purple Legs: Private Action Series. [online] Anto Lloveras Socioplastics. Available at:
