The Trans-Lighthouse Manifesto, authored by Anto Lloveras (with E. Lorenzo), constitutes a pivotal speculative-operational text within the Socioplastics corpus, first presented as a paper titled FAROS_TRANS: The Trans-Lighthouse Manifesto at the I International Congress of Ecological Humanities at Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (UAM) in May 2023. Positioned at the confluence of ecological humanities, critical urbanism, and socioplastic theory, the manifesto deploys the lighthouse not as a solitary monumental beacon but as a distributed, transnational infrastructure of care, signaling, and relational repair amid civilizational crisis. It formulates a universal vision for the "TRANS-LIGHTHOUSE" as speculative literature projecting future humanity, advocating leaps of scale that forge a hybrid sensibility capable of reconciling utopian aspiration with pragmatic intervention. This hybridity bridges antagonistic poles—speculation and execution, ecology and urbanism—by reframing the planetary city network as an interconnected, dispersed body.
It challenges anthropocentric urban hierarchies by emphasizing programmatic acupuncture: subtle, site-responsive interventions that activate latent ecological and social potentials in derelict or overlooked spaces. These "Trans-Lighthouses" operate as portable condensers of memory, ritual affection, and metabolic exchange, converting urban voids into zones of hospitality, solidarity, and degrowth-oriented coexistence. The figure of the lighthouse thus becomes migratory and rhizomatic—flashing across scales from local installations to planetary networks—guiding navigation through agonistic frictions, sonic ecologies, and thermodynamic realities of affection. In this framework, architecture shifts from mechanical imposition to affective infrastructure, prioritizing vulnerability, radical proximity, and biospheric ethics over extractive growth.
Within the broader Socioplastics apparatus, the Trans-Lighthouse Manifesto functions as a generative node that operationalizes biospheric humanism, linking relational essays, filmed bodies, and decolonial sequences (such as LAPIEZA interventions) to a speculative "Fifth City"—a post-growth urban imaginary where human and non-human entanglements sustain civilization through networked care rather than competition. It critiques representational stasis in late-modern critique by proposing executable epistemologies: verification through external embedding, persistence via stratified archives, and sovereignty via dispersion. Presented amid ecological humanities discourse addressing the crisis of civilization, the manifesto insists on thought strategies rooted in hybrid scenarios—utopian yet grounded—that enable survival-oriented practices in unstable times. Its ongoing echoes in Lloveras's 2026 blog entries reinforce it as a living protocol, inviting transgenerational dialogue and continued metabolic construction of shared, resilient realities.
Lloveras, A. (2026) 'The Trans-Lighthouse Manifesto * Ecological Humanities', antolloveras.blogspot.com [online]. Available at: https://antolloveras.blogspot.com/2026/01/the-trans-lighthouse-manifesto.html
