Beuys’s notion of social sculpture, wherein society itself constitutes the plastic medium of artistic intervention, is retained yet critically re-engineered: the charismatic shamanic persona is replaced by a procedural authority grounded in syntactic density and recursive conceptual structures. Similarly, Bourriaud’s relational aesthetics—initially centred on convivial encounters and temporary micro-utopias—is reconfigured into a broader metabolic relationality that incorporates ecological systems, algorithmic processes and infrastructural networks. Early LAPIEZA activations illustrate this transition, transforming simple urban gestures into distributed nodes within civic ecologies. The framework further resonates with the maintenance ethics articulated by scholars such as Shannon Mattern and Maria Puig de la Bellacasa, whose emphasis on care, repair and infrastructural literacy informs Socioplastics’ emphasis on metabolic maintenance as a primary cultural operation. Finally, the systemic logic of actor-network theory, associated with Bruno Latour and informed by Maturana and Varela’s concept of autopoiesis, provides the structural model through which artworks function as self-referential epistemic assemblages. In this synthesis philosophy ceases to operate as commentary upon artistic production and instead becomes its generative infrastructure. Socioplastics therefore proposes a rigorous shift within contemporary practice: the artwork no longer represents ideas but constitutes a load-bearing epistemic system, capable of sustaining meaning within increasingly volatile informational environments.
SLUGS
1100-CONTEMPORARY-ARCHITECTURAL-POSITIONING
