{ ::::::::: SOCIOPLASTICS * Sovereign systems for unstable times: Lemon Kiss * Unstable Installation and Relational Ritual (2014)

Sunday, February 22, 2026

Lemon Kiss * Unstable Installation and Relational Ritual (2014)

 

Lemon Kiss is a pivotal unstable installation and solo-no-solo exhibition by Anto Lloveras, presented in September 2014 at Galerija Luka (HDLU Istre) in Pula, Croatia (with related actions in nearby Poreč). It exemplifies Socioplastics' core logic: relational activation through minimal, multisensory, and durational gestures that collapse boundaries between artist, audience, object, and site. The show is explicitly solo but never alone — a "no-solo" format that integrates contributions from over 100 artists via LAPIEZA's online series, turning individual authorship into collective relational mesh.


Core Elements and Multisensory Landscape

  • 100 bright lemons as central protagonists: Fresh, organic citrus fruits deployed across the gallery floor, walls, and thresholds. They serve as affective interfaces and temporal markers — their sharp smell, vivid yellow color, and inevitable decay create a living, decaying horizon that engages all senses. Lemons are not static props but active protocols of presence: squeezed, offered, smelled, or simply left to rot, they modulate space through acidity, fragrance, and ephemerality.
  • 120 LAPIEZA adds: Numbered posters from 10 prior LAPIEZA exhibitions plus a dense array of tag-collages (also called HIPERVÍNCULOS – Mapas Relacionales). These hyperlinked relational maps form a visual/textual archive of previous activations, extending the exhibition into a portable, distributed network.
  • Meat cuts: Two preserved specimens from earlier MEAT series (Basel and Madrid phases) — raw or processed animal flesh as material memory of consumption and violence.
  • Yellow Bag debut: The Yellow Bag makes its first major appearance here as a temporary coloured satellite — carried, placed, or used to transport lemons/sand/residues, linking to the Blue Bags nomadic logic but introducing brighter, more affirmative chromatic presence.
  • Additional relational satellites: Purple pants, white shirt, and other clothing items worn/performed by Lloveras, plus sand transported from Bolonia Beach dune (Spain) directly to Pula (via the Blue Bags series continuity).

Performative and Ritual Actions

  • Tuesday, September 16, 2014: Presentation and live actions in Pula — squeezing lemons, sharing, spatial rearrangements, viewer interactions.
  • Friday, September 19, 2014: Follow-up actions in Poreč — extending the ritual to a second site, reinforcing migratory/translational mobility.
  • The lemons' decay over the exhibition duration (smell intensifying, color fading, fruit collapsing) becomes a ritual of impermanence — no preservation, only metabolic process. This contrasts the preserved meat cuts (taxidermied memory) with organic volatility, underscoring post-relational ethics: care through letting go, presence through absence.

Conceptual Anchors in Socioplastics

  • Unstable social sculpture: Lemons as situational fixers — low-material, high-affective devices that activate civic surfaces without spectacle. Echoes El Dorado (shared survival skin) and Blue Bags (nomadic carrier), but emphasises smell, color, and situation as relational syntax.
  • Never Alone protocols: The title reframes in 2026 retrospectives as Lemon Protocols — rules for sustained presence: offer, share, decay, remember. The solo-no-solo format embodies distributed authorship — Lloveras initiates, but the mesh (LAPIEZA contributions, viewer actions, decaying lemons) co-authors.
  • Multisensory relational landscape: Smell (acidity), sight (bright yellow horizon), touch (squeezing), taste (implied sharing), time (decay cycle) collapse into one immersive ecology. The gallery becomes a temporary affective organism, metabolising institutional space into living archive.
  • Cross-series integration: Links to Taxidermy (flesh/memory preservation), Yellow Bag (chromatic debut), Blue Bags (sand transport), and broader LAPIEZA rhizome. In 2026 reframings (e.g., "Never Alone * Lemon Protocols" post), it is positioned as precursor to epistemic hardening — lemons as early "protocols" of relational stability amid instability.

Documentation and Legacy

  • Primary blog entry: Detailed 2014 post with photos, installation views, and action descriptions (linked from Blue Bags continuity).
  • Video traces: Related clips on TOMOTOFILMS/YouTube (e.g., Yellow Bag debut footage).
  • Press/local coverage: Croatian outlets (kulturistra.hr, culturenet.hr) describe it as video-art, relational, and performative, noting the "Lemon Kiss" title's ironic tenderness amid raw materials.
  • 2026 updates: Retroactively framed in "Never Alone * Lemon Protocols" as multisensory protocol for never-alone presence — lemons as interfaces against isolation in unstable times.

Lemon Kiss is not an exhibition of objects but a ritual machine: lemons decay, relations circulate, the mesh expands. It proves Socioplastics' axiom — sovereign systems thrive through minimal, metabolic gestures that invite participation without demanding permanence.

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