The project The Road to Restoration (2021–2022) unfolds as a sustained socioplastic investigation into the restorative capacities of movement, landscape, and cinematic attention. Comprising forty short films distributed openly via YouTube, the series rejects the logics of exhibition, spectacle, and institutional framing in favour of a dispersed, durational ecology of viewing. Each film operates as a micro-situation in which body and environment enter a temporary pact, producing what might be described as a moving restorative field. Aligned with contemporary research on restorative environments and psychophysiological recovery, Lloveras’ work does not illustrate scientific claims but translates them into an aesthetic and experiential register. Nature is not staged as a backdrop, nor is dance presented as virtuosic display; rather, both are treated as co-agents in a process of recalibration. The films insist on slowness, repetition, and restraint, foregrounding attention as an ethical stance. In doing so, The Road to Restoration situates itself within a lineage of post-minimal, post-conceptual practices that privilege affect, duration, and embodied cognition over representational excess.
Across the forty films—ranging from WAR to STATIC HORSE, from FOREST to SHORE—the viewer encounters a consistent grammar: a solitary body, a precise movement vocabulary, and a landscape marked by geological, vegetal, or infrastructural presence. This repetition is not redundant but cumulative. Each site introduces a subtle variation in texture, rhythm, and resistance, allowing the choreography to register environmental specificity. Dance here functions less as expressive language than as adaptive protocol: a way of listening with the body. The figure does not dominate the frame but negotiates it, often appearing small, tentative, or partially obscured. This relational positioning echoes socioplastic principles, where form emerges through interaction rather than imposition. The films’ modest scale and limited duration further reinforce this ethic, encouraging contemplative rather than consumptive viewing. What emerges is a cinematic archive of attentiveness, where restoration is not promised as cure but enacted as momentary alignment between movement, place, and perception.
The restorative dimension of the project lies precisely in its refusal of therapeutic instrumentalisation. While the films clearly engage questions of mental health and recovery, they do so obliquely, avoiding didactic narratives or emotional climax. Instead, restoration is framed as a by-product of sustained exposure to non-extractive relations. The body moves without urgency; the camera observes without intrusion; the landscape remains indifferent yet generative. This triadic relation produces a low-intensity affective field that counters the hyper-stimulation of contemporary visual culture. In this sense, The Road to Restoration resonates with broader critiques of cognitive overload and attention economy, proposing an alternative regime of sensing grounded in patience and reciprocity. Dance becomes a form of situated knowledge, a way of thinking through joints, breath, and gravity. The films thus extend the discourse of relational art into the domain of embodied ecology, where care is enacted not through social interaction alone but through calibrated coexistence with non-human environments.
Within the broader framework of Socioplastics, The Road to Restoration can be understood as a moving infrastructure of care. Like other Lloveras projects, it operates without residue, monument, or closure, yet accumulates meaning through seriality and memory. The open accessibility of the films reinforces their ethical position: restoration is not a privilege but a shared possibility. By dispersing the work across digital platforms while anchoring it in specific landscapes, the project bridges virtual circulation and material presence. It proposes an art practice attuned to fragility—of bodies, ecosystems, and attention itself. In an era marked by ecological anxiety and psychic exhaustion, The Road to Restoration offers neither solution nor spectacle, but something arguably more radical: a sustained invitation to slow down, to move with rather than against the world, and to recognise restoration as an ongoing, relational practice rather than a final state.
Lloveras, A. (2025) The Road To Restoration – 40 Films. Available at: https://antolloveras.blogspot.com/2022/04/the-road-to-restoration-xxxv.html
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