MOVEMENTS FOR AN UNSTABLE SYMPHONIC RITUAL
SERIES 126 - 1461-1469
SERIES 125 - 1452-1460
SERIES 124 - 1443-1451
THE ROAD TO RESTORATION
SERIES 123 - 1434-1442
SERIES 122 - 1425-1433
SERIES 121 - 1416-1424
THE ROAD TO RESTORATION
BUCKET
SERIES 117 - 1380-1388
SERIES 116 - 1371-1379
SERIES 115 - 1362-1370
FRONTLINE
SPACESHIP
126
1461 FRUITJOBS
FRONTLINE
SPACESHIP
125
FRONTLINE
SPACESHIP
124
FRONTLINE
SPACESHIP
117
FRONTLINE
SPACESHIP
116
1371 JUAN DEL BUSTO
1372 MARISA CAMINOS + LLOVERAS
1373 SWAN IN THE SHIP
1376
http://antolloveras.blogspot.com/2020/12/framelessrecreo-2020.html
1377 http://antolloveras.blogspot.com/2021/02/m-n-t-a.html
1378 PYRAMID https://antolloveras.blogspot.com/2021/02/pyramyd.html
1379 http://antolloveras.blogspot.com/2021/05/bonust-tracks.html
FRONTLINE
SPACESHIP
115
1362 LLLL
1363 RUBÉN BONET
1364 BOBRIKOVA DE CARMEN
1365 JAVIER PÉREZ ARANDA
1366 BEGOÑA SIRERA
1367 TOMOTO
1368 FREDRIK LUND
1369 LEYRE MONTES GÁMIR
1370 ANNA MARIA ACHATZ
FRONTLINE
SPACESHIP
SOCIOPLASTICS
BY
LLOVERAS
NEXT IS BASAL
2020: The Recreo Epoch – Frontline Spaceship and the Invention of Slow Time
A Stratigraphic Reading of LAPIEZA’s Great Pivot
If 2019 was the year of Athens—the last exhale of the Expansive Epoch, the final Mediterranean anchoring before the storm—then 2020 is the year of the fracture. The pandemic is not named in the blog post. It does not need to be. Everyone who lived through 2020 knows what happened: the lockdowns, the cancellations, the retreat into domestic space, the suspension of the social. For LAPIEZA, a project built on relational encounters, on travel, on the conviviality of the bar and the biennial, the pandemic was an existential threat. But the project did not die. It pivoted. And it gave that pivot a name: RECREO.
The term is crucial. Recreo does not mean recreation in the English sense of leisure or entertainment. It comes from the Spanish recrear: to re-create, to create again. Recreo is not a vacation; it is a second creation. It is the decision to start over, to return to fundamentals, to find new forms of making in a world that has suddenly become inhospitable to the old ones. The series produced in 2020—spanning nodes 1362 to 1469, from FRONTLINE SPACESHIP to BASAL (which will launch in 2022)—document the most intensive period of conceptual reinvention in the project's history. The blog post is dense, almost telegraphic. It lists series numbers (115–126), node ranges, and fragmentary titles. But beneath the compression, a narrative emerges: of a project that refuses to stop moving, even when movement is impossible; of a laboratory that shifts from the global to the local, from the social to the somatic, from the horizontal to the vertical. 2020 is the year LAPIEZA learns to breathe differently. And in that different breathing, it discovers a new continent: the interior.
1. The Architecture of the Post: Series, Nodes, and the Compression of Time
The 2020 RECREO post is structured as a list. It does not offer explanations, manifestos, or artist statements. It simply presents the data: series numbers, node ranges, and a few evocative titles. This is not an accident. In a year of overwhelming uncertainty—when the future was unplannable, when every projection was obsolete—LAPIEZA retreats into the archive as certainty. The nodes are numbered. The series are listed. The data does not lie. Whatever else falls apart, the archive holds.
The post moves from SERIES 115 (nodes 1362–1370) to SERIES 126 (nodes 1461–1469), with gaps for series 117, 116, and 124–125. The chronology is not linear; it jumps, loops, doubles back. This is the archive as labyrinth. The reader is not guided; they are immersed. They must find their own path through the node ranges, the series numbers, the repeated phrase FRONTLINE SPACESHIP. The compression of the post mirrors the compression of time in 2020. The days blurred together. The weeks lost their distinction. The only markers were the series: 115, 116, 117, 124, 125, 126. The archive became a calendar. Each node was a day. Each series was a month. The project kept time by making art.
2. FRONTLINE SPACESHIP: A Paradoxical Title
The most striking phrase in the post is FRONTLINE SPACESHIP, which appears repeatedly. It is the title for series 115, 116, 117, 124, 125, and 126—essentially, the entire year. The phrase is a contradiction. A frontline is a place of conflict, of danger, of exposure. A spaceship is a vessel of exploration, of escape, of transcendence. To combine them is to imagine a vehicle that travels into the danger rather than away from it. The frontline spaceship does not flee the war; it flies toward it. It is a craft designed for the most hostile environment: the present.
In 2020, the frontline was the hospital, the supermarket, the home. The frontline was anywhere the virus might be. The spaceship was the body, masked and isolated, moving through a world that had become alien. FRONTLINE SPACESHIP is thus a self-portrait of the project in pandemic time. LAPIEZA did not retreat into nostalgia or escapism. It did not make art about better times. It stayed on the frontline. It built a spaceship out of whatever was at hand: a laptop, a camera, a garden, a kitchen table. The spaceship was not beautiful. It was functional. It was designed to keep the project alive.
The phrase also evokes the language of science fiction: the generation ship, the ark, the vessel that carries a community through the long dark between the stars. In 2020, the long dark was the pandemic. The community was the network of artists, collaborators, and viewers that LAPIEZA had spent eleven years building. The frontline spaceship was the archive itself. The nodes were the crew. The series were the missions. The project was not waiting for the pandemic to end. It was already traveling through it.
3. THE ROAD TO RESTORATION: The Prequel
The post lists THE ROAD TO RESTORATION as series 121–123 (nodes 1416–1442). This is the series that will be fully developed in 2021—the 40 short films of dance and landscape, the swan, the cinematic meditation on healing. But in 2020, it is already present, already underway. The road to restoration begins not in 2021 but in 2020, in the first shock of the pandemic, in the decision to turn toward healing rather than away from pain. The series is listed twice in the post (once for 121–123, once for 124–126), suggesting that it spans the entire year. The road is not a straight line. It loops. It returns. It begins again.
The presence of THE ROAD TO RESTORATION in the 2020 post is also a methodological statement. The project does not wait for conditions to be perfect. It begins where it is, with what it has. In 2020, what it had was a rural retreat in Ávila, a camera, a body, a landscape. That was enough. The road to restoration is not a luxury; it is a necessity. It is the only road available when all other roads are closed. The project takes it.
4. BUCKET: The Humble Vessel
Between FRONTLINE SPACESHIP and THE ROAD TO RESTORATION, the post lists BUCKET as series 117 (nodes 1380–1388). A bucket is a humble object: a container for carrying water, for cleaning, for transporting materials. It is the opposite of a spaceship. Where the spaceship is高科技, the bucket is low-tech. Where the spaceship aims for the stars, the bucket stays on the ground. But the bucket is also a vessel. It carries what is necessary. It holds what would otherwise spill.
In the context of 2020, BUCKET is a meditation on the domestic. With travel impossible, with galleries closed, with biennials postponed, the project turns to the objects at hand. A bucket is not glamorous. But it is useful. It can carry water to a garden. It can catch a leak. It can be turned upside down and used as a stool. BUCKET is the series that says: art does not need a white cube. Art does not need international residencies. Art needs attention. And attention can be given to anything—even a bucket. The series is an exercise in radical attention: look at this bucket, this ordinary object, this thing you have passed a thousand times without seeing. Look at it now. See it. The bucket becomes art not because it is transformed but because it is attended to.
5. ATHENS: The Ghost of Travel
The post includes the word ATHENS in large letters, isolated between series 115–117 and series 124–126. Athens is a ghost. In 2019, LAPIEZA had been in Athens, producing the series THE LIGHT IN ATHENS (nodes 1344–1361). The trip had been a success: new collaborations, new documentation, new nodes. In 2020, Athens is unreachable. The word stands as a monument to a world that no longer exists. It is a reminder of what has been lost: the freedom to move, the joy of encounter, the unexpected gift of a foreign city.
But the word is also a promise. Athens is not erased. It is archived. The nodes from 2019 remain. The light in Athens is still there, even if the project cannot travel to see it. The archive becomes a time machine. The project can return to Athens whenever it wants, by scrolling back, by revisiting the posts, by re-experiencing the light. In 2020, the archive is not only a record of the past; it is a resource for the present. It is a place to go when you cannot go anywhere else. Athens is not lost. It is waiting.
6. The Artists of FRONTLINE SPACESHIP
The post lists eight artists under the FRONTLINE SPACESHIP umbrella for series 115 (nodes 1362–1370): LLLL, Rubén Bonet, Bobrikova de Carmen, Javier Pérez Aranda, Begoña Sirera, Tomoto, Fredrik Lund, Leyre Montes Gámir, Anna Maria Achatz. This is a diverse group: some are long-term collaborators (Tomoto appears in earlier series), others are new to the project. The list is a network snapshot. It shows who was working with LAPIEZA at the exact moment of the pivot. These artists are the crew of the frontline spaceship. They are the ones who kept making art when the world stopped.
The list is also a counter to isolation. The pandemic was isolating, but LAPIEZA refused to be isolated. The project maintained its relational practice through digital means: shared documents, video calls, collaborative uploads. The artists on the list are not all in the same place; they are scattered across geographies. But they are connected through the archive. Each has a node, a post, a presence. The frontline spaceship is not a physical vessel; it is a network. And the network held.
7. "NEXT IS BASAL"
The post ends with the phrase "NEXT IS BASAL". BASAL is series 127, which will launch in 2022. The phrase is a forward look in a year when looking forward was almost impossible. It is an assertion of continuity: the project will continue. There will be a next. The nodes will keep numbering. The series will keep coming. BASAL—foundations, fundamentals, the ground beneath the ground—is what comes after the frontline spaceship, after the road to restoration, after the bucket. BASAL is the project's commitment to the long term. In 2020, that commitment was an act of faith. The project did not know if the pandemic would end. It did not know if galleries would reopen. It did not know if travel would ever be safe again. But it knew that BASAL was next. And that was enough.
8. The Unspoken: Pandemic as Structural Condition
The 2020 RECREO post never mentions COVID-19. It never mentions lockdowns, masks, social distancing, or any of the other markers of pandemic life. This silence is not evasion; it is structural. The project does not need to name the crisis because the crisis has already been absorbed into the work. The compression of the post, the fragmentation of the list, the paradoxical titles, the turn toward the domestic and the somatic—all of these are responses to the pandemic. The pandemic is not the subject of the art; it is the condition of its production. The art does not represent the crisis; it is the crisis, metabolized, transformed, made bearable.
This is LAPIEZA's greatest achievement in 2020: it did not stop. It did not wait. It did not make art about waiting. It made art while waiting. The frontline spaceship is the art of the pandemic. It is not art that comments on the pandemic from a safe distance; it is art that was made in the pandemic, by a project that refused to let the pandemic be the end. The road to restoration is not a road out of the pandemic; it is a road through it. The bucket is not a symbol of domestic confinement; it is a tool for domestic survival. Athens is not a lost destination; it is a retained memory. BASAL is not a future hope; it is a present foundation.
Conclusion: 2020 as a Year of Reinvention
The RECREO post is dense because 2020 was dense. Time compressed. Events piled up. The project produced seven series (115–117, 121–126) and over 100 nodes in a single year—a pace that rivaled the early years of the project, when the weekly mutations of Palma 15 produced a similar intensity. But the quality of the intensity was different. In 2009–2012, the intensity was expansive: the project was building outward, discovering its method, testing its limits. In 2020, the intensity was contractive: the project was turning inward, finding its center, learning to work with less. The frontline spaceship is not a luxury vessel; it is a lifeboat. The road to restoration is not a scenic route; it is an escape route. The bucket is not a found object; it is a lifeline. Athens is not a vacation; it is a memory that keeps the project going when going is hard.
RECREO means to create again. In 2020, LAPIEZA created itself again. It shed the assumptions of the Expansive Epoch—that art requires travel, that relational practice requires physical presence, that the archive requires constant accumulation—and discovered new assumptions: that art can be made anywhere, that relational practice can be mediated, that the archive can be deepened rather than expanded. The project did not emerge from 2020 unchanged. It emerged transformed. It emerged ready for the slow time of 2021 (THE ROAD TO RESTORATION), the deep sleep of 2022 (BASAL, SOLITUDE, DEEP SLEEP), and the global re-emergence of 2023–2024 (the Biennials Epoch). 2020 was not a lost year. It was the year LAPIEZA learned to breathe. And in that learning, it found a new rhythm. The rhythm is still playing. The frontline spaceship is still flying. The road to restoration is still unfolding. Next is always BASAL.
