::::::::: SOCIOPLASTICS : The Ontological Shift in Contemporary Practice: From Sculpting Form to Weaving Relationality

Friday, January 23, 2026

The Ontological Shift in Contemporary Practice: From Sculpting Form to Weaving Relationality

The landscape of contemporary art and spatial practice finds itself at a critical juncture, poised between the legacy of Modernist object-making and an emergent paradigm defined by process, translation, and relational entanglement. A close analysis of the selected projects from Antoni Lloveras's body of work—specifically WORK-SATELLITE, FIREWORKS, SWAN, TAXIDERMY, and THREADS—reveals a coherent, sophisticated artistic methodology that navigates this shift not as a stylistic choice, but as a profound ontological repositioning of the artist's role. This methodology transcends individual mediums, operating instead through a set of core principles: an embrace of translational acts that destabilize fixed meanings, a commitment to relational infrastructures that foster social and material connections, and a pursuit of ritualistic engagement that reactivates civic and communal memory. These projects collectively argue for an artistic practice where the artwork is no longer a terminal object for contemplation, but an active, unstable node within a broader network of meaning-making—a shift from creating forms to choreographing conditions for becoming.

The foundational proposition of WORK-SATELLITE, described as an "ontological shift" towards the "translational and relational," provides the theoretical backbone for this entire enterprise. It posits the artist not as an originator of fixed forms, but as a mediator operating within a field of perpetual transformation. This aligns with advanced critical discourse on computational creativity, where cutting-edge research explores multi-agent systems designed to translate artistic concepts across domains (from painting to poetry, for instance) by preserving semantic and affective core meanings rather than merely formal attributes. Lloveras’s practice mirrors this computationally-inspired logic in an embodied, social register. In THREADS, the "critical infrastructure" is not a physical building but the social fabric itself, woven through performative acts. Similarly, FIREWORKS exemplifies "hyperplastic writing," a spectacular yet ephemeral translation of gesture and light into a public text that is immediately consumed by time and atmosphere. These works demonstrate that translation is not about finding equivalencies but about instigating a process—a crossing from one state to another that inherently produces new social and perceptual relations, a concept echoed in experimental works like The Oracle, which uses immersive technology to create collective rituals exploring fluid identity beyond the human.

This translational practice finds its most potent civic expression in projects that engage directly with the urban palimpsest, treating the city not as a canvas but as a living, conflicted body. TAXIDERMY, with its incisive approach to "cutting the city back to life," operates through a form of critical urban surgery. It moves beyond nostalgic preservation or brutal erasure, proposing instead a careful dissection and reassembly of urban memory and material. This mirrors, in a deeply material way, the conceptual frameworks used in cross-domain art translation, where an artwork’s essence is decomposed, mapped, and regenerated in a new context. SWAN extends this engagement into the realm of the mythic, interrogating how icons and commons are constructed. By focusing on a figure like the swan—a symbol loaded with cultural meanings from fairy tales to corporate branding—the project excavates the collective imaginaries that shape our shared spaces. It asks how new, more inclusive urban mythologies can be authored, turning public space into a forum for narrating collective identity. Here, the "relational infrastructure" becomes a narrative one, where the artist’s role is to create the frameworks (the rituals, the gatherings, the symbolic interventions) through which a community can re-imagine its own story.

Ultimately, the power of this curated selection lies in its presentation of a holistic artistic ecology. From the theoretical groundwork of SATELLITE to the visceral public spectacle of FIREWORKS, from the material archaeology of TAXIDERMY to the social weaving of THREADS and the mytho-poetic excavation of SWAN, these projects are not discrete artworks but interconnected facets of a single, expansive practice. They model an artistic response to a world understood as a complex system of flows, translations, and dependencies. This practice resonates with the most urgent contemporary questions, from the ethics of AI and creativity to the search for new collective rituals in a digital age and the need for reparative urban strategies. Lloveras’s work, as evidenced by this quintet, suggests that the future of relevant artistic practice lies not in the grandeur of the autonomous masterpiece, but in the precision, empathy, and catalytic energy of the translational act—the skilled, ethical mediation between matter and meaning, between memory and potential, between the individual body and the body politic.

Lloveras, A. (2026) 100 Works by Anto Lloveras. Available at: https://antolloveras.blogspot.com/2026/01/100-works-by-anto-lloveras.html