The work of Anto Lloveras and LAPIEZA articulates a contemporary reconfiguration of Joseph Beuys’s notion of Social Sculpture, not as metaphor but as operative infrastructure. Their practice positions art as a “situational fixer,” a provisional device activated within zones of institutional inertia, urban precarity, and epistemic fragmentation. In this sense, socioplastics does not denote a stylistic tendency but an ethical method: art as a relational instrument that modulates social energies, spatial tensions, and ecological imaginaries. The Portable Archive—comprising the chromatic bags and briefcase—embodies this method through radical portability and symbolic opacity. These nomadic objects operate as epistemic hinges, translating everyday logistics into aesthetic events and civic provocations. Their circulation across Madrid, Lagos, Norway, and Mexico dissolves the ontological boundary between artwork, tool, and witness. What emerges is a trans-temporal archive that privileges process over monumentality, mobility over fixation, and encounter over exhibition. Within this framework, the archive ceases to be a repository of dead time and becomes instead a kinetic interface where memory is continuously renegotiated. Lloveras and LAPIEZA thus reposition the artist not as a producer of objects but as a curator of conditions—someone who orchestrates fragile situations of co-presence, friction, and speculative solidarity.
This relational epistemology finds its urban counterpart in the Urbanas and Minimal Architecture series, where architecture is stripped to its diagrammatic and ethical minimum. Here, space is conceived less as enclosure than as proposition. Bamboo, thread, light, and void function as low-impact materials that foreground inhabitation as a performative act rather than a consumptive one. The city, in this reading, becomes an analytical framework—a mutable field of power relations, infrastructural residues, and embodied negotiations. El Palmeral extends this logic into a full-fledged ecological manifesto. Its vision of a zero–fossil fuel city in Málaga, articulated through dense verticality, shaded boulevards, and urban gardens, collapses the false dichotomy between utopia and pragmatism. Rather than offering a techno-fetishistic smart city, it proposes a civic ecology grounded in climatic intelligence, social compactness, and metabolic frugality. Architecture here is not an object of spectacle but a choreography of sustainable rhythms. In this sense, Lloveras’s dictum that architecture resembles skiing—requiring balance, foresight, and slope-reading—becomes an epistemological metaphor for ecological governance: an art of attentive navigation rather than extractive domination. The socioplastic project deepens through performativity and filmic duration in Cuerpos Filmados and Double Sided. These works situate the body as both medium and archive, registering agency across temporal strata. The decade-long accumulation of filmed gestures, conversations, and architectural encounters operates as a counter-archive to institutional historiography. It privileges minor narratives, peripheral subjectivities, and fragile presences over canonical authorship. In collaboration with Mateo Feijoo, Double Sided mobilises minimal choreography and dual-channel temporality to foreground rhythm, repetition, and corporeal co-attention. Beckettian austerity intersects with American Minimalism to generate a poetics of delay and resonance, where meaning emerges through durational exposure rather than narrative resolution. These works propose an ethics of slowness within a hyper-accelerated cultural economy. They insist on the irreducibility of embodied time against the algorithmic compression of experience. Film, in this context, is not documentation but an ontological extension of architecture—an instrument for spatialising consciousness and politicising presence.
Ecological humanities and land art practices within the Kingdom Series, Hidden Forces, and the Landart Fjord Museum consolidate LAPIEZA’s commitment to subtraction as care. The geometric removals in moss and the black rectangles inscribed upon dunes enact a delicate dialectic between concealment and revelation, marking human impact while refusing scenic exploitation. These gestures operate as negative monuments—memorials to restraint rather than conquest. Re-(t)exHile at the Lagos Biennial radicalises this ethic through material memory. Discarded textiles, traced across postcolonial waste circuits, become tactile cartographies of sovereignty, labour, and environmental injustice. The installation does not aestheticise dispossession; it renders visible the entangled economies of extraction and abandonment. Finally, YouTube Breakfast reframes digital accumulation as collective intelligence. By releasing audiovisual knowledge into public circulation, it proposes a “digital new school” that decentralises pedagogy and reclaims archives from institutional enclosure. Across all these projects, Lloveras and LAPIEZA articulate a transdisciplinary grammar where art, architecture, ecology, and epistemology converge into a single ethical proposition: to inhabit the world as a provisional commons, sustained by attentiveness, reciprocity, and imaginative courage.
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