Conceived as an instance of unstable social sculpture, the project deploys ordinary blue plastic carrier bags—ubiquitous, disposable, mass-produced—as deliberately neutral carriers that refuse aesthetic autonomy in favor of operational relationality. Rather than presenting the bag as a readymade object elevated through institutional framing, Lloveras mobilizes it as a durational agent whose value emerges solely through situational activation: carried daily across urban and transnational contexts, filled with provisional contents, placed temporarily in public or semi-public spaces, or exchanged in encounters that generate fleeting affiliations. This practice extends earlier relational precedents—most notably the migratory minimalism of Francis Alÿs or the hospitality protocols of Rirkrit Tiravanija—yet diverges sharply by insisting on the object's infrastructural residue rather than ephemerality alone. The blue bag functions simultaneously as tool (for transport), marker (of presence or trace), and residue (of metabolic exchange), embodying what Lloveras terms translational mobility: a capacity to translate between disparate social, economic, and affective registers without claiming permanence or spectacle. Documented exhaustively on the primary archive at antolloveras.blogspot.com, the series traces a nomadic itinerary—Madrid to Berlin, Cádiz, Galicia, Croatia, Norway, Provence, Prague, Mexico City, Lagos, and beyond—where each displacement registers subtle modulations in local material cultures, waste economies, and vernacular rhythms. The work's longevity, now exceeding a decade, underscores its refusal of event-based temporality; instead, it accumulates as a living protocol, recalibrated daily through habitual use, thereby modeling a form of metabolic persistence that aligns with Socioplastics' emphasis on systems engineered for volatility. Unstable Social Sculpture Translational Mobility
Unstable Social Sculpture Translational Mobility constitute the operative axes of the Blue Bags series, enabling Lloveras to shift sculptural discourse from static form toward processual infrastructure within unstable conditions. The instability invoked here is not performative fragility but structural precondition: the bag's inherent disposability and lack of intrinsic value preclude fetishization, forcing attention onto the relational field it infiltrates and the affects it circulates. In practice, this manifests through precise yet understated gestures—draping bags over urban fixtures, carrying them visibly during pedestrian drifts, incorporating them into collaborative situations (as in LAPIEZA interventions with figures like Paul Doeman in Berlin 2014), or allowing them to absorb traces from other artists' works (paintings, drawings, objects). Such actions position the bag as a situational fixer, a minimal device that intervenes in existing ecologies without imposing hierarchy, instead facilitating gentle convergences or gentle disruptions. The translational dimension further intensifies this logic: each relocation—from European cities to postcolonial urbanisms in Lagos or Oaxaca—registers differential pressures of globalization, migration, and resource flows, turning the bag into a portable observatory of vernacular readymades. Unlike traditional social sculpture (Beuysian or otherwise), which often sought symbolic redemption through communal participation, Lloveras's version remains austere and non-redemptive; the work metabolizes precarity rather than transcending it, aligning with Socioplastics' metabolic jurisprudence by calibrating flows of affection, memory, and material without external adjudication. Video documentation (e.g., YouTube clips from LAPIEZA Berlin 2014) and blog entries reveal a consistent methodology: no fixed choreography, only recurrent activation through everyday carry, placement, and exchange, yielding a distributed archive of micro-encounters. This durational consistency—daily use across geographies—distinguishes Blue Bags as the longest-running emblem of the framework, its recurrence within Lloveras's self-citations reinforcing epistemic mesh density. The series thus critiques spectacle-driven relationality by privileging infrastructural subtlety: the bag's blue monochrome operates as chromatic restraint, echoing earlier minimalisms while extending them into nomadic, affective territories. Situational Fixer Metabolic Persistence
Situational Fixer Metabolic Persistence finalize the Blue Bags' contribution to Socioplastics by consolidating its role as a portable, self-reinforcing protocol that sustains the field's gravitational autonomy through recursive, low-visibility operations. As situational fixer, the bag intervenes minimally yet precisely—anchoring transient relations, marking provisional territories, or registering urban metabolism without discursive overreach—thereby modeling a form of gentle niche formation that resists co-option into institutional circuits. Its persistence, metabolic rather than monumental, arises from habitual integration into the artist's daily praxis: carried constantly, the object accrues traces (scuffs, contents, contexts) that sediment into the archive, feeding back into the Century Packs' curvature thresholds. This feedback loop exemplifies Lloveras's broader strategy—transforming vernacular carriers into epistemic instruments—where instability becomes operative fuel rather than deficit. Extensions into chromatic variants (Yellow Bags, Green Briefcase) attest to the protocol's modularity, yet the original blue iteration retains primacy for its emblematic neutrality and global itinerancy. In the 2026 reflections, Blue Bags appear as foundational to the gravitational stabilization phase: their accumulated activations contribute lexical mass, enabling the field to curve epistemic space independently. The series thus achieves a rare synthesis—minimal means yielding maximal infrastructural effect—positioning it as exemplary of Socioplastics' sovereign systems for unstable times: not an artwork to be viewed, but a mechanism through which social plasticity manifests durably, nomadically, and without apology.
(Lloveras, A. 2026. Blue Bags as Unstable Social Sculpture * Translatorial Mobility and the Ethics of the Situational Fixer (2014–ONGOING). Available at: https://antolloveras.blogspot.com/2026/01/blue-bags-as-unstable-social-sculpture.html [Accessed 28 February 2026].)
