The Yellow Bag series constitutes one of the most radical gestures of reduction within contemporary socio-plastic practice. Emerging in 2014 and remaining active for more than a decade, the work resists the fetishisation of the art object by proposing instead what Anto Lloveras terms a “situational fixer”: a minimal, portable device through which context, memory, and affection are activated. The bag is neither sculpture nor prop, neither container nor archive in the conventional sense. Its power lies precisely in its emptiness, in its capacity to receive and transmit without accumulation. Positioned within the broader framework of Unstable Installation Series, the Yellow Bag reframes artistic practice as continuous presence rather than episodic production. The reference to Beckett’s What Is the Word is not ornamental; it signals an ethics of hesitation, of working at the threshold of language and form. The monochromatic insistence of yellow operates as a visual constant, a satellite colour orbiting mutable environments. In doing so, the work displaces authorship from fabrication to attention, from object-making to situated listening. The Yellow Bag thus functions as an architecture of affection: a fragile yet persistent structure that hosts relations rather than forms.
Spatially and temporally, the Yellow Bag unfolds as a nomadic score traversing urban, coastal, rural, and transitional landscapes across Europe, Africa, and Latin America. Madrid operates as a recurrent synthesis node, but the work resists centrality, absorbing Cádiz salt, Galician earth, Prague cold, Lagos dust, Mexican sand, or Nordic light with equal intensity. These materials are not collected as trophies; they are carried as temporary companions, often displaced and re-situated in subsequent actions. A paradigmatic gesture occurs in the ritual collection of 1000 grams of sand at sunset on a Cádiz beach, later transported to Mexico City, establishing a geopoetic connection between Atlantic and Pacific. Such acts foreground displacement as a form of care rather than extraction. The bag’s constant chromatic identity contrasts with mutable outfits and parallel series, amplifying its adaptability while preserving continuity. Each activation—walking, drawing a circle, depositing sand, carrying leaves—remains deliberately modest. The work refuses monumentality and permanence, aligning itself with seasonal rhythms and ecological cycles. Quickly reclaimed by weather, fungi, or the city itself, these gestures affirm subtraction and minimalism as ethical positions within an era of overproduction.
From an art-theoretical perspective, the Yellow Bag operates at the intersection of relational aesthetics, ecological humanities, and post-object art. Yet it also marks a departure from the conviviality often associated with relational practice. Relation here is not staged as encounter but as duration: a long-term commitment to movement, repetition, and care. The bag acts as a vernacular readymade whose meaning is not inherent but accrued through use. Its seriality is not numeric but experiential, woven through diaries, photographs, films, and embodied memory. The work aligns with notions of social sculpture while stripping them of heroic rhetoric. Instead, it proposes a light social sculpture—light not in the sense of superficiality, but of weightlessness and adaptability. The Yellow Bag does not impose form; it tunes itself to context. In this sense, it functions as a monochromatic satellite, quietly orbiting diverse territories while reflecting their conditions. Its emptiness becomes infinite potential, a refusal to fix meaning in advance. The work thus critiques both the commodity logic of contemporary art and the extractivist tendencies of certain site-specific practices.
Ultimately, the Yellow Bag articulates a politics of presence grounded in radical simplicity. Its longevity—remaining active from 2014 to 2026—demonstrates that sustainability in art is not a matter of materials alone but of behaviour, rhythm, and restraint. The bag does not accumulate value through rarity or spectacle; it accumulates significance through care, repetition, and shared experience. As part of the broader socioplastics framework, it proposes an alternative economy of meaning where gesture outweighs object and relation supersedes possession. The donation or reactivation of the bag becomes an act of affective repair, inviting institutions and communities to participate rather than to contain. In an age marked by ecological crisis and digital saturation, the Yellow Bag offers a quiet resistance: no leftovers, no excess, only presence. It insists that contemporary art can be radically minimal, deeply contextual, and ethically grounded—an art that walks, carries, listens, and leaves almost nothing behind, except memory and connection.
(Lloveras, A., 2015. “Yellow Bags — Unstable Installation”. Available at: https://antolloveras.blogspot.com/2015/06/yellow-bagsunstable-installarton.html
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