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LACALLE emerges in 2010 as a performative-urban dispositif grounded in a precise political intuition: to reclaim the street as a space of poetic agency and civic audition. Conceived by Anto Lloveras under the experimental umbrella of Tomoto Films, the project situates itself within the lineage of critical urban practices that treat the city not as backdrop but as interlocutor. LACALLE operates through minimal yet incisive gestures—walking, voicing, amplifying—that reinsert affect and presence into increasingly regulated public space. Its title explicitly invokes Henri Lefebvre’s notion of the “right to the city,” translating that theoretical claim into an embodied, sonic practice. Rather than staging protest through mass or spectacle, LACALLE opts for precision: the voice as tool, sound as inscription, movement as authorship. The project thus reframes political action as a form of spatial listening, where attention becomes resistance. Poetry is not represented but enacted, redistributed into the urban fabric through fragile, temporary acts that nonetheless leave perceptual traces. In this sense, LACALLE proposes a micro-political aesthetics, one attuned to infrastructure, memory, and the overlooked thresholds of everyday urban life.
The project unfolds as a series of mobile performances across diverse urban and peripheral contexts—Ferrol, Madrid, Gijón, Sevilla, and Almería—each selected not for representational value but for their latent acoustic and social conditions. Central to the project is the MiniRoc system, developed by Hectruso: a wearable sound apparatus carried as a backpack, transforming the performer into a walking loudspeaker. This device functions as an expressive prosthesis, collapsing the distance between body, technology, and environment. The city is activated through voice—sometimes whispered, sometimes amplified—addressing walls, markets, mines, or abandoned squares. These actions do not seek dialogue in the conventional sense; rather, they expose the city’s capacity to receive, absorb, and refract sound. By mobilising live sound (El Intruso) and voice (Maite Dono), LACALLE composes ephemeral acoustic architectures that briefly redraw the spatial order. Each action is documented and archived, but its primary existence remains situational and time-bound.
From an art-theoretical perspective, LACALLE aligns with psychogeography and performance art while critically extending them into the sonic register. The dérive here is not only spatial but acoustic: walking becomes a method for mapping resonance, friction, and silence. Unlike spectacle-driven urban interventions, LACALLE privileges scale and vulnerability. The performer is exposed, carrying both equipment and voice as a visible declaration of presence. Sound operates as a tactic rather than an aesthetic end, revealing the political dimension of who is allowed to speak, to linger, to be heard. The project resonates with practices of acoustic ecology and expanded poetry, where language exceeds semantic transmission to become material force. Its gestures—addressing a market wall, sounding a salt mine—constitute what might be called a poetics of the infrastructural: attention to those urban supports that structure life yet remain unseen. LACALLE thus critiques the neutralisation of public space by reactivating it through sensorial disturbance, insisting that the city is not mute but constantly negotiating meaning through sound.
Ultimately, LACALLE proposes a method rather than a closed work: listening as action, voice as claim, and mobility as authorship. Its serial, open structure resists institutional capture, remaining adaptable to different contexts and collaborators. The project does not monumentalise dissent; it practises it quietly, persistently, through presence. By treating poetry as politics and sound as a civic right, LACALLE articulates a contemporary form of urban resistance attuned to affect and perception. It reminds us that the right to the city is not only a matter of access or policy but of sensorial participation—the right to sound, to speak, and to alter the atmosphere of shared space. In an era of increasing surveillance and commodification of the urban realm, LACALLE’s fragile interventions acquire renewed urgency. They assert that even minimal acts—walking with a voice, amplifying a breath—can momentarily reconfigure the commons, restoring the city as a space of encounter, memory, and critical imagination.
(Lloveras, A., 2010. “LACALLE — A Right-to-the-City Device”. Available at: https://antolloveras.blogspot.com/2025/09/lacalle-right-to-city-device.html
