The Blue Bags series (2014–ongoing) is one of the longest-running projects in Anto Lloveras's Socioplastics practice. It embodies the concept of Unstable Social Sculpture — a form of relational, durational, and translatorial art that rejects static objects in favour of mobile, everyday interventions that activate social, spatial, and contextual relations over time and across geographies. Core Idea and Execution:
- The object: Ordinary blue plastic shopping bags (the cheap, ubiquitous kind from markets or supermarkets). Lloveras selected them for their aesthetic neutrality, disposability, and anonymity — they carry no inherent symbolism or artistic prestige, making them ideal as a "neutral carrier" or situational fixer.
- The practice: The bags are carried daily by the artist as part of routine life (shopping, transporting objects, moving between cities). They accumulate traces — sand from dunes, fruit from markets, everyday items — and are deployed in subtle, performative actions: placed in galleries, around other artists, in public spaces, or used to collect material from specific sites (e.g., sand from a gigantic dune in Cádiz, which was then transported and displayed back in Madrid).
- Translatorial mobility: The series is explicitly "translational" — the bags move between locations (Madrid → Barcelona → Berlin → Cádiz → Galicia → Croatia → Norway → Rotterdam → London → Provence → Praha → Mexico City → Lagos, Nigeria, and many more cities/countries documented from 2014 to 2026). Each relocation translates context, memory, and materiality without fixed narrative or spectacle. The work is ongoing and "in constant use" — Lloveras has stated he still carries and activates them daily.
Conceptual Anchors
- Unstable Social Sculpture: Drawing from Joseph Beuys's social sculpture but making it unstable and portable, the bags function as light, metabolic interventions that "cut into urban flesh" or reveal substrata of material memory. They are situational fixers — ephemeral structures that negotiate civic surfaces, public/private boundaries, and affective relations without romanticizing permanence or instability.
- Durational and relational praxis: No beginning/end spectacle; the sculpture lives through repetition, carrying, and minor displacements. It critiques vanishing civic presence by turning infrastructure (the bag as carrier) into affective repair and choreography of making.
- Vernacular readymade: Echoes Duchamp but shifts to decolonial/relational sequences — the everyday object becomes index of passage, memory, and metabolic sovereignty in unstable times.
- Extension of earlier works: Started as an extension of "El Dorado" (2013 socioplastic sculpture), evolving into a core example of portable dramaturgy and unstable installation.
Documentation and Evolution
The series is chronicled chronologically on Lloveras's primary blog (antolloveras.blogspot.com), with entries from 2014 (initial Madrid–Berlin–Cádiz phase) through 2026 updates framing it as "Unstable Social Sculpture * Translatorial Mobility and the Ethics of the Situational Fixer (2014–ONGOING)". It appears in exhibitions (e.g., 5th Base Gallery, London 2015; Fresh Museum, Provence 2014), alongside related series like Yellow Bags or Taxidermy, and integrates with broader Socioplastics themes of archive-as-infrastructure, post-relational ethics, and epistemic resilience. In short, Blue Bags is not about the bags as art objects — it's about the durational, body-city relation they enable: a nomadic, low-impact sculpture that metabolises global instability into sustained civic modulation and relational flux. It's a living demonstration of Socioplastics' axiom: sovereign systems for unstable times, where the most banal carrier becomes epistemic infrastructure through persistent, translational use.
Primary source: Lloveras, A. (2014–2026) 'BLUE BAGS – UNSTABLE SOCIAL SCULPTURE – TRANSLATORIAL', available at: https://antolloveras.blogspot.com/2014/08/blue-bags-2014-madrid-berlin-cadiz.html (and ongoing updates, accessed February 19, 2026).
