The conceptual re-entry into Cuerpos Filmados (Filmed Bodies) two decades after its inception marks a sophisticated shift from the archival to the teleological within the landscape of contemporary socioplastic practice. By revisiting these specific "fixers of human agency" in 2028, Anto Lloveras transitions from a documentarian of the "Fifth City" to a clinical observer of temporal erosion and relational persistence. This process of re-filming is not a mere nostalgic exercise but a rigorous investigation into the "positional essay" as a longitudinal study of biological and urban entropy. The aesthetic gravity of this endeavor lies in the confrontation between the digital permanence of the original 2008–2018 recordings and the inevitable decay or transmutation of the biological subjects. In this second iteration, the camera functions as a connective tissue across time, stitching together the fragmented ecologies of Madrid, Mexico DF, and beyond, thereby validating the "First Decade of Relational Essays" as a foundation for a broader, diachronic critique of how human labor and aesthetic resistance endure within increasingly commodified urban strata.
Central to this twenty-year reversion is the "memory of seeing," a phenomenological encounter where the archive ceases to be a static repository and becomes an active, reflexive mirror. When Lloveras focuses on a selective subset of his original subjects—the flamenco masters of Casa Patas, the intellectual architects of urban theory, or the ephemeral performance artists—he creates a high-contrast dialogue between the "potential agency" of the past and the "realized history" of the present. This selective methodology is crucial; by not filming everyone, the artist highlights the specific nodes of survival that have withstood the pressures of the post-industrial epoch. The resulting footage becomes a "social sculpture" composed of both the presence of the body and the palpable absence of its former vitality. This gap, this temporal void, is where the essence of socioplastics resides—in the friction between the original action and its contemporary echo. The artist’s gaze in 2028 is necessarily more cynical yet more empathetic, capturing the "fragility" of the human condition not as a theoretical premise, but as a visible, physical reality etched into the skin and the movement of the filmed subjects.
Furthermore, the re-visitation of these "bodies" serves to deconstruct the rizomatic structure of the project, exposing the underlying nerves of the LAPIEZA Art Series as a living organism. In the context of C2-level artistic discourse, this act of returning constitutes a "re-situation" of the artist himself within his own framework of active socioplastics. The sites of filming—once vibrant laboratories of creative labor—are now viewed through the lens of an "archaeology of the contemporary," where the previous interventions of figures like Basurama or Jonas Mekas act as ghost-layers beneath the current urban fabric. This methodology challenges the inherent transience of performance art by asserting that the "relational series" is never truly finished; it merely hibernates until the next cycle of observation. By documenting the evolution of these affective rituals and intellectual labors, Lloveras effectively maps the trajectory of the "Quinta Ciudad" from a speculative utopian space to a weathered, inhabited territory. The "chula" (cool) nature of this project, as colloquially noted, is actually its profound ability to render the invisible passage of time as a tangible, plastic material that can be molded, archived, and confronted. Ultimately, the formal implications of this twenty-year return suggest that the archive is a tool for future-proofing human agency against the erasure of digital and physical gentrification. The decision to film "some, but not all" subjects introduces a curated narrative of survival that emphasizes the qualitative depth of the socioplastic experience over quantitative data. This selective focus allows for a deeper exploration of "shared authorship" across time, where the subject and the filmmaker are united in their aging, their persistence, and their mutual recognition within the meta-filme. This project stands as a definitive manifesto on the power of collective memory, positioning the "filmed body" as a site of permanent resistance that refuses to be relegated to the past.
As we move through 2026 toward the twenty-year mark, the anticipation of these re-encounters builds a new layer of "radical attention," ensuring that the rituals of the city and the bodies that perform them remain central to our understanding of the aesthetic-political landscape. Lloveras’s work thus transcends the decade of its birth, proving that the true strength of a socioplastic archive is found in its capacity to be re-opened, re-seen, and re-lived. Lloveras, A. (2026). Positional Essays: Decade of Relational Essays. [online] Anto Lloveras Blog. Available at:
