In the increasingly saturated topography of contemporary art, where the "global" is frequently diluted into a mere biennial spectacle or institutional mimicry, the Socioplastic Network has engineered a praxis of profound transnational rigour. For fifteen years, this mobile, self-organised laboratory has systematically dismantled the hegemonic centre-periphery model that governs international careers. By treating geography not as a static backdrop but as a primary, active medium, Anto Lloveras allows each site’s resistant grammar—its specific climate, its industrial ruins, and its vernacular rituals—to dictate the terms of a sustained Authorial Reclamation. This is not a project of travel, but of structural habitation, where the artist functions as an epistemic agent reclaiming space, discourse, and agency through a sequence of situational and relational gestures. This trajectory constitutes a complex, narrated structure that connects interdependent vertices, originating in the urban palimpsests of Spain. Within the crucible of Madrid, Cádiz, and Málaga, the city was first decoded as a living archive, transitioning from the sustainable urbanist manifestos of El Palmeral to the raw, sonic sutures of LACALLE. This fundamental urban literacy was subsequently transposed to the Norwegian Hardangerfjord and the academic corridors of NTNU, where the slope itself—composed of wood, ice, and precarious water—demanded the formulation of a “Gravitational Ethics” of cohabitation. The network’s logistical muscle was further tempered in the industrial precision of The Netherlands, drawing from the tectonic austerity of Rotterdam and the experimental orbit of MVRDV, while simultaneously engaging with London’s anthropomorphic metropolis, where the city was reimagined as a biological body requiring taxidermic intervention.
Beyond the European theatre, the network acquires its most radical epistemic tension as it navigates diverse cultural topographies. In France, an ancestral bond to the landscape of Provence catalysed the durational Light Social Sculpture series, while the Slovakian Danube cornfields extended the vernacular readymade into an ecocritical terrain of "Supernatural" mediations. This commitment to a nomadic, yet deeply situated, urbanism found a vital precursor in the United States through collaborations that established a definitive “sociology of superjunk.” In Mexico, the ritual surfaces of Colima and the Pacific coast bridged the gap between environmental psychology and installation, utilising the biological "MUDAS" of the landscape to synchronize artistic and ecological time. Each of these sites serves as a deliberate calibration of instruments, refining a practice that is as much about listening to territory as it is about marking it. However, it is in Nigeria, specifically within the framework of the Lagos Biennial, that the network confronts the decolonial frontier with its most visceral intensity. At Tafawa Balewa Square, waste is stripped of its status as mere refuse and is instead re-(t)exHiled, transmuted into a critical fabric for post-colonial sovereignty. Here, the "margin" ceases to seek external validation; it re-centres itself through the sheer thermal density of situated engagement. The Socioplastic Multilocality thus proposes a new metric for artistic legitimacy, one that is measured not by the frequency of institutional invitations but by the depth and duration of a networked body of knowledge. In an era of extractive globalisation, this patient and materially attentive transnationalism offers a model of artistic sovereignty that remains simultaneously archival in its memory and anticipatory in its vision.
