Conceived as an alter ego, SHEMAN operates through displacement rather than representation. The body that animates it is never fully visible; instead, authorship dissolves into a hybrid silhouette, producing what might be termed distributedSubjectivity alongside urbanEmbodiment. This is sculpture as delegated action: a form that exists only through being carried, negotiated, and risked within real circulation systems. Its activation in the street converts infrastructure into dramaturgy, foregrounding friction, fatigue, and attention as sculptural materials. The city does not host the work; it resists it. SHEMAN Trans-Humanoid emerges not as an object but as an operative condition, a vertical anomaly that infiltrates the city with deliberate awkwardness. Its exaggerated limb, elongated and unstable, rejects anthropomorphic coherence in favour of a prosthetic surplus that dislocates the human scale. Here, postMonumentality collides with corporealDelegation: the work abandons the fixity of sculptural sovereignty and redistributes agency across carrier, street, and passerby. The sculpture’s extreme lightness—both physical and symbolic—functions as a counterweight to the historical burden of statuary, replacing permanence with exposure, and endurance with vulnerability.
No pedestal. SHEMAN belongs to a lineage of practices that treat the urban field as a living archive rather than a neutral backdrop. Yet it departs from performative spectacle by refusing legibility. The figure is neither costume nor character; it is an ontologicalExtension and a situationalDevice. Its ambiguous morphology—somewhere between tool, creature, and architecture—produces cognitive delay. Viewers hesitate. That hesitation is the work. In this suspension, the sculpture activates Socioplastics not as social harmony but as social tension, a minor disturbance that reveals how bodies are regulated, scaled, and tolerated in public space. The refusal of heaviness is crucial. At under twenty kilos, SHEMAN dismantles the association between mass and authority. What circulates instead is a fragile excess, a verticality that bends, wobbles, and depends on care. This introduces affectiveLoad and logisticalPoetics into sculptural discourse. Carrying becomes thinking. Balance becomes negotiation. The work’s technical modesty—improvised skins, flexible structure—signals an anti-heroic stance aligned with precarious urban subjects rather than institutional spectacle. Sculpture here is closer to survival strategy than formal resolution. To carry is to commit. Ultimately, SHEMAN Trans-Humanoid articulates a politics of presence grounded in risk and proximity. Its street appearances in Madrid do not monumentalise dissent; they metabolise it. The figure neither blocks nor decorates; it interferes softly, persistently, insisting on co-presence. In doing so, it reframes art as a portableOntology and a relationalInfiltration, where meaning is neither stored nor displayed but enacted. This is sculpture after permanence, architecture after enclosure, identity after coherence. What remains is a moving question mark, upright, fragile, and insistently alive.
Lloveras, A. (2014) Sheman Transhumanoid Light Sculpture. Available at: https://antolloveras.blogspot.com/2014/01/sheman-transhumanoid-light-sculpture.html
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