We did not begin with a manifesto. We began with EXIT.
Ten pieces. Ten numbers. A door that was also a departure. In 2009 we did not know we were building 180 series or 2200 pieces. We knew only the rhythm: one series, then another, then another. The bazaar came next, then the fly. That was enough.
Fifteen years later, COPOS — flakes, fragments, snow — closes nothing but disperses everything. Between EXIT and COPOS: thirst, bullets, desire, fresh museums, incisions, wild flowers, unstable love, grief, radiance, voyages, loops, textiles, pastures, worms, gardens, stones, turtles, trapezes, summers on and off, ego trips, and autumn light.
This is not an archive. It is a duration.
FIRST EPOCH: THE ROOM AS LABORATORY (2009–2012)
Weekly mutation. Palma 15, Madrid. More than 500 pieces.
LAPIEZA was born in an apartment in Malasaña. Not a gallery. A living organism. Every Thursday, a new work. Every week, a new series. The rhythm was vertiginous because material precarity transformed into conceptual potency. There was no money. There was an abundance of ideas.
The first series were called EXIT, BAZAR, MOSCA, KIWI, SOCIOPLASTICS, SALES, FIRE, BALL, PAN, FASTFORWARD, SUPERMARKET, PLAYTIME. The names were verbs and everyday places. No solemnity. Only urgency.
EXIT was the first breath. The room opened as what was being abandoned. Not a triumphal entrance. A back door. Art did not begin with a statement of principles. It began with a gesture of leaving. Leaving the white cube. Leaving the singular author. Leaving the object as unit of value. But also: leaving the first series toward the second. EXIT was always already a passage.
BAZAR was the market. In a bazaar, value is not fixed: it emerges in the encounter between object, seller, passerby, mood, time of day. LAPIEZA learned its affective economy here. Each work had no price. It had a capacity to be re-diffused. The bazaar was the anti-auction.
MOSCA was the pest. The uninvited guest, the necessary irritant. Every open community attracts flies. LAPIEZA did not fumigate them. It incorporated them.
These first twenty series established a symbiotic language. What was exhibited was not only object: it was gesture, document, body, narrative. Installation became language. The room became laboratory. The collective, the immediate, the relational were vital axes.
PLAYTIME carried the title of Tati. Play as method. The series did not work. It played. And in playing, it produced meaning.
FAMILY introduced the domestic as political scene. The family was not a theme. It was a structure of affection and power that LAPIEZA dissected without cruelty.
UNSTABLE appeared early. The word anticipated the collapse. LAPIEZA was never stable. That was always its condition of possibility.
When the physical room closed in 2012, it was not an ending. It was a liberation. LAPIEZA became a nomadic body. The first epoch closed like a seed that explodes.
SECOND EPOCH: DRIFTS, RESIDENCIES, AND AFFECTIVE GEOMETRIES (2013–2019)
No fixed room. Multiple geographies. 60 series in 7 years.
Between 2013 and 2019, LAPIEZA became a nomadic device. Cádiz, Mexico, Croatia, Bogotá, Marseille, Oslo, Bratislava, Amsterdam, Stockholm, Paris, Berlin, Trondheim, Novigrad, Lima. Each place contributed a texture. Each series, a variation of the gesture.
Residencies became forms of situated research. Installation no longer imposed itself: it listened and responded. The international network expanded not as institutional strategy but as a practice of critical hospitality.
GLITTER introduced shine as political material. Glitter is the festive that can also be a weapon.
THIRST was the first somatic blow. Not desire. Need. LAPIEZA began to name the body as a territory of lack.
BULLET was the second blow. Violence entered the language of the series. Not as representation. As material.
DESIRE completed the triad. The drive that moves everything. LAPIEZA did not fear the raw.
SYSTEM named the frame. The series reflected on its own infrastructure. Of shadows, artifices, stabs, and radiant dawns.
NETA was Mexico pure. La neta: the true, the naked. Of beautiful urban animals and other affections.
NOWHERE was the non-place. Dispersed landscapes. Mexico City, Madrid. The series that occurred where there was no map.
RUBBER was elasticity. Of daily emotional elasticity and the scale of pain. Rubber as resistance and as wound.
POSITIONAL ESSAYS was the first methodological manifesto. We swim in all directions. The map is sense.
STRUCTURAL CONVERSATIONS took place in Norway. Structural conversations. Cold as condition of dialogue.
FRESH MUSEUM was the turning point. LAPIEZA built its own portable institution. The museum was not a place. It was a rhythm.
SUGAR SUNSET was the sweet dusk. The sugary as slow poison.
AERIAL ROOTS was the botanical contradiction. Roots in the air. The plant that breathes outside the earth. Like LAPIEZA.
THICK SMOKE moved through Madrid, Cádiz, Berlin, London, Tehran, Cannes. Smoke that darkens but also signals.
ZERO ZERO was the zero starting point. Oaxaca, London, Mexico, Croatia, Madrid, Oslo, Paris, Trondheim. Zero as empty plenitude.
SWEET CORN BRUTALISM was the definitive oxymoron. Sweet corn plus brutalism. The agricultural and the architectural. The tender and the hard.
PERIODICAL INCISIONS AND DISSECTIONS was the operating room. LAPIEZA cut itself. Periodic incisions. Curating as cutting.
EXFOLIATION was the peeling skin. Layer after layer.
WILD FLOWERS was what grows in the cracks. Uncultivated beauty.
THE WORD named the power of naming.
ARTNATIONS reached the first massive abstraction. One hundred numbers. Nations of art. Not geopolitics. Affection.
FLOCK was the peak of the second epoch. 243 pieces. Three to the fifth power. The flock. In FLOCK, the artist list became a mesh of legitimacies: Wolfgang Laib and Ann Hamilton and David Hammons and Bad Bunny and Sean Scully and Urs Fischer and Anselm Kiefer and Senga Nengudi and Theaster Gates alongside unknowns and near-unknowns. No hierarchy. Only flock.
THIRD EPOCH: RECREO — SLOW TIME, BODY LANDSCAPE, LIVING ARCHIVE (2020–2022)
Active retreat. Landscape as method. Archive as breath.
With the arrival of 2020, LAPIEZA entered a phase of fertile retreat. After years of displacement and expansion, the project took an active pause in the rural environment of Ávila, giving birth to the series RECREO. The term does not refer to leisure. It means to create again.
A new time was established: slow, atmospheric, linked to listening to the landscape and to the sedimentation of the archive as a living body. Pieces no longer followed one another with urgency. They emerged from walks, from minimal observations, from almost invisible acts. Work concentrated on the production of low-scale symbolic actions, intimate but documented with precision.
A deep affective dimension activated, where the gesture became almost vegetal, rooted to the ground. The project's memory took root. Series like RECREO, BASAL, THE ROAD TO RESTORATION insisted on the articulation between body, landscape, and language. The work was not exhibited. It was lived. Not projected. It sedimented.
The archive transformed into breath. Documentation took on a poetic and organic tone. Each piece was a record of presence. The link with the rural was not only physical but epistemological. LAPIEZA investigated the rhythm of moss, the logic of the mountain, slowness as politics.
UNSTABLE LOVE SERIES arrived in October 2022 with the number 1500. Fifteen hundred pieces. Thirteen years. The title named it directly: Unstable Love. Not a breakdown. A recognition that the infrastructure had always been unstable, always held by love — not only systems.
What followed was a grief sequence. GREY. DEEP SLEEP. LA MAR. SORROW — So sorry. The grief. Not art about grief. Grief as material.
When 2022 closed, this phase left a legacy of symbolic depth. LAPIEZA had learned to be still.
FOURTH EPOCH: BIENNIALS — INSTITUTIONAL OPENINGS AND GLOBAL SCENE (2023–2024)
Post-institutional socioplastics. Art as critical mediation.
After the retreat of RECREO, LAPIEZA re-emerged into public space, this time with a more defined international projection. The years 2023 and 2024 marked a scenic and institutional turn. The project participated in the Lagos Biennial and Contextile Guimarães, among other platforms, articulating a multiple, simultaneous, relational presence.
The scene was no longer a room or a landscape. It was a mobile affective infrastructure operating as a network of territorial activation.
Series from this phase — VOYAGE VOYAGE, LOOP, RADIANCE, PRIME FACTOR 3X, THE LIGHT IN CÁDIZ, RE-(T)EXHILE, PSICAMB, HORTUS, TP7 — elaborated an aesthetic that conjugated lightness and density. Pieces related to water, climate, the invisible, the symbolic, the ecological.
Collaborations opened with biennials, congresses, and territorial networks, such as Territorios Pastoreados and Lugo Emerxe, where art functioned as critical mediation of territory. In this stage, socioplastics redefined itself as post-institutional language. Museography became a tool for listening. The archive manifested as a constellation of gestures, texts, bodies, materials, and affects.
Documentation acquired a choral, shared, multiple character. Works no longer belonged to a closed authorship but to a system of active relations. The educational turn also intensified: videos, podcasts, publications, roundtables extended the radius of action of each piece.
LAPIEZA entered the scene as an expanded agency inhabiting the pedagogical, the curatorial, and the political.
FIFTH EPOCH: RURALIST — AFFECTIVE ARCHIPELAGOS AND SCHOOL OF TERRITORY (2025–)
The territory as classroom. Affection as critical tool.
With the move to Galicia in 2025, LAPIEZA inaugurated a new phase: territorial, affective, pedagogical. The seat was fixed in O Vicedo, between mountain and sea, where the agency reconfigured itself as a rural archipelago. This gesture was not only a geographic change but an epistemological one: to live art as listening to place, as a situated form of knowledge and symbolic intervention in the common.
The first actions of this stage — SAN ROQUE, PSICAMB 2025, BANCAL, SVERIGE, NIGONHO, TRAPECIO, TURTLE VISIONS — did not seek to occupy the territory but to let themselves be transformed by it. A politics of slow attention activated. The names of the pieces filled with toponymy, vegetation, climate, rivers, stones, fog.
Socioplastics became a ruralist relational form, closer to the essay, to the minimal gesture, to shared ritual. The link between art and education reactivated with a clear public vocation. LAPIEZA became a diffuse school, a laboratory of aesthetic thought in relation to landscape, memory, and ecology.
The rural was not the opposite of the urban. It was its critical fold, its mirror.
BANCAL — terraced field — spoke of agriculture, slope, patience. TURTLE VISIONS offered slow, ancient, shelled perception. INVERNO DE PEDRA was stone winter. MIÑOCA was the worm. HORTUS the garden. CUENTOS the stories. The non-human entered as point of view.
Then SUMMER ON and SUMMER OFF. The simplest binary. Presence and absence. Light and dark. Series as breath.
Then EGO TRIPS in Valencia and Palma. Then CÁDIZ OTOÑO / LA LUZ — autumn light. Then COPOS.
CODA: COPOS
COPOS means flakes. Snowflakes. Fragments.
The final twenty pieces of the sequence — 2181 to 2200 — carry this title. Your note says: THE END OF AN ERA.
But the era does not end with a bang. It ends with dispersion. Flakes falling. Not disappearing. Scattering.
Between EXIT and COPOS: fifteen years. One hundred eighty series. Two thousand two hundred pieces. Hundreds of artists. A dozen geographies. Five epochs.
EXIT was a door. COPOS is snow. The door opened onto a room that became a body that became a landscape that became a territory that became a school that became flakes falling on the mountain and the sea of O Vicedo.
LAPIEZA does not conclude. It flakes.
This essay was written from the inside of the duration. Not as criticism. As continuation.
