161 CONFETTI (1902–1932) 2024:
The 2024 art series represents a deep investigation into historical timelines, spanning from the mid-18th century to the early 20th century, while grounding itself in contemporary global dialogues. The collection moves from the resilient visions of Africa and the architectural inquiries of the Lagos Biennial to the atmospheric light of Cádiz and the psychological weight of liminality. Significant focus is placed on the intersection of academic and artistic practice, as seen in the transdisciplinary knowledge exchanges in Barcelona and the textile-based political narratives presented at the Guimarães Biennial. This body of work utilizes chronological markers—such as the 1747–1799 period of Tra(d)iciones or the 1902–1932 era explored in Confetti—to bridge the gap between historical heritage and modern expression, creating a tapestry of cultural memory and territorial identity through projects like Lugo Territorios Pastoreados.
2024: The Biennials Epoch – From Liminality to Confetti
A Relational Cartography of LAPIEZA’s Institutional Opening
If 2023 was the year of re-emergence—a tentative, almost cautious return to the global scene after the slow time of Ávila—then 2024 is the year of full immersion. The project does not simply participate in the art world; it activates it. Across twelve major series (149–161), spanning nodes from 1728 to 1932, LAPIEZA operates as a post-institutional agency: a mobile infrastructure capable of inhabiting biennials, congresses, territorial networks, and discursive platforms with equal intensity. The year is marked by a deliberate expansion of scale and a deepening of thematic complexity. Where 2023 moved through affect and art history, 2024 moves through territory, trauma, textiles, liminality, resilience, and the radical lightness of confetti. The series are longer, the collaborations more extensive, and the theoretical stakes higher. This is LAPIEZA at its most confident: no longer proving its relevance but demonstrating its necessity.
THE LIGHT IN CÁDIZ (Series 149)
The year begins where the previous year left off: with light. THE LIGHT IN CÁDIZ (nodes 1728–1737) is a return to a motif that first appeared in 2019 with The Light in Athens and was revisited in 2022 with La Luz en Cádiz. But the 2024 iteration is more expansive, more grounded in specific geography. The blog post reads like a field notebook: Tarifa, Trafalgar, Barbate, Vejer de la Frontera, Benalup, Conil de la Frontera, La Janda. Each place name is accompanied by historical and geographical notes. Tarifa, "the southernmost point of continental Europe," site of the 1294 Battle of Tarifa. Trafalgar, strategic location in the Strait of Gibraltar, witness to numerous historical events. Barbate, where the river meets the Atlantic. Vejer, with its preserved old town of whitewashed houses and narrow streets. The list of nodes includes evocative fragments: INSTRUMENTOS, EL CALIFA, CHEERS, MMM, PLATOS AL DENTE, LECTURAS, MURAL EN EL ALTILLO DE PEDRO PECHUGA MUSIC, NIGHTLIGHTS, ESTUDIO PIGMENTOS, LA CELEBRACIÓN.
This is not a travelogue. It is a territorial inscription. LAPIEZA is not documenting a trip; it is becoming part of the landscape. The light in Cádiz is not a metaphor for enlightenment; it is the actual Mediterranean light, which has drawn artists for centuries. But unlike the romantic painters who came to capture it, LAPIEZA comes to inhabit it. The series performs a slow, attentive listening to place. The names of towns and villages become nodes in the archive. The light becomes a material condition of production. By the end of the series, the project has embedded itself in the geography of southern Spain. This will prove crucial for what follows: the move to Galicia in 2025 is prefigured here, in the careful attention to how a territory can become a co-author.
RE-(T)EXHILE: Lagos IV Biennial (Series 150)
From the light of Cádiz, the project moves to the heat of Lagos. RE-(T)EXHILE is LAPIEZA's participation in the 4th Lagos Biennial of Art and Architecture, held in Tafawa Balewa Square—"a former colonial racecourse transformed into a post-independence civic space." The site is crucial. The biennial, curated by Folakunle Oshun and Kathryn Weir, "deliberately moves away from conventional display models to explore open, processual forms where the artwork is not an endpoint but a generative gesture." This is precisely LAPIEZA's language. The project contributes a relational installation that "investigates the environmental and geopolitical impact of global textile waste in Africa and its circulation as postcolonial commodity."
The title RE-(T)EXHILE is a dense condensation: re (again, back), textile (fabric, weaving), exile (displacement, banishment). The work unfolds through "found materials, migrant textiles, and ephemeral architectures, weaving together poetic and critical threads around exile, refuge, and repair." Artists including Martinka Bobrikova, Óscar De Carmen, Adebola Badmus, and María Alejandra Gatti contribute to this polyphonic intervention. The project integrates prior field research in Lagos (2022–2023), visual essays, social media-based storytelling, and a photographic archive by Mide King.
This is LAPIEZA operating at its most politically engaged. The series addresses the global circulation of waste—textile waste, specifically—as a postcolonial phenomenon. The Global North discards its unwanted fabrics, which become raw material for economies in the Global South. The installation does not simply represent this dynamic; it embodies it, using found and migrant materials. The work is "generative": it continues to activate possibilities after the biennial closes. The archive of the series—photographs, essays, social media traces—becomes a living document. RE-(T)EXHILE is not an exhibition; it is an intervention into the material and political fabric of globalization.
RESILIENT VISIONS (Series 151)
From the collective action of the biennial, the project moves to a more focused meditation on healing. RESILIENT VISIONS (nodes 1738–1746) brings together nine artists from across the African continent: El Anatsui (Ghana/Nigeria), Wangechi Mutu (Kenya), Ibrahim Mahama (Ghana), Otobong Nkanga (Nigeria), Hassan Hajjaj (Morocco), Ghada Amer (Egypt), Zanele Muholi (South Africa), William Kentridge (South Africa), and Meschac Gaba (Benin). The series statement reads: "The transformative power of art as a catalyst for healing and renewal in landscapes scarred by conflict and adversity. Through their exploration of social and political themes, innovative use of materials, and deep engagement with local communities, these artists offer glimpses of hope and possibility in the midst of turmoil."
Each artist is given a dedicated node, with a brief description and a link. El Anatsui's large-scale sculptures from recycled bottle caps. Wangechi Mutu's mixed-media explorations of gender and race. Ibrahim Mahama's installations of repurposed jute sacks. Otobong Nkanga's multidisciplinary environmental investigations. Zanele Muholi's powerful photography of South Africa's LGBTQ+ community. William Kentridge's animated films addressing colonialism and apartheid. This is not a survey of contemporary African art; it is a constellation of resilience. The series argues that resilience is not merely survival but transformation. These artists do not simply endure trauma; they work it into beauty, critique, and possibility. The series title is carefully chosen: Resilient Visions suggests that vision itself—the capacity to see differently—is what resilience produces.
TRA(D)ICIONES (Series 152)
TRA(D)ICIONES (nodes 1747–1799) is a complex title that plays on the Spanish words tradiciones (traditions) and traiciones (betrayals), with the parenthetical D suggesting dicciones (dictions) or perhaps dicciones (ways of speaking). The series thus names the tension between inheritance and rupture, between what is passed down and what is abandoned. The nodes span a wide range—over 50 nodes, making this one of the longest series of the year. Unfortunately, the blog post does not provide detailed content, but the title alone is suggestive. In the context of LAPIEZA's 2024 trajectory, TRA(D)ICIONES likely engages with the project's own relationship to art history. The pedagogical series of 2023 (Pop, Abstract Expressionism) were acts of inheritance. TRA(D)ICIONES asks what it means to betray those traditions—to take what is given and twist it, break it, or leave it behind. The series may also engage with the specific traditions of the places LAPIEZA inhabits: the textile traditions of Lagos, the light traditions of Cádiz, the rural traditions of Ávila and Galicia. To work with tradition is always to risk betrayal. The series holds that tension open.
LIMINALITY (Series 154)
LIMINALITY (nodes 1801–1820) is a theoretical anchor for the entire year. The term, drawn from anthropology (Arnold van Gennep, Victor Turner), refers to the state of being in-between: neither here nor there, neither one thing nor another. The liminal is the threshold, the space of transition where normal rules are suspended and new possibilities emerge. For LAPIEZA, liminality is not a temporary condition but a permanent operating system. The project has always inhabited thresholds: between art and life, between exhibition and archive, between the local and the global, between the physical and the digital. In 2024, with the project moving between Cádiz, Lagos, Guimarães, Lugo, and Barcelona, liminality becomes geographical as well as conceptual. The series likely engages with the experience of being in transit, of living out of suitcases, of working across time zones and languages. But liminality is also the condition of the biennial itself: a temporary event that aspires to permanent impact. The series names what LAPIEZA has always known: that the most generative space is the one that is neither fully inside nor fully outside, neither fully art nor fully something else. The threshold is where the work happens.
IAPS Barcelona 2024: Enacting Transdisciplinary Knowledge (Series 155)
IAPS Barcelona 2024 marks LAPIEZA's engagement with the International Association for People-Environment Studies. The congress theme is "Enacting Transdisciplinary Knowledge." This is not an art event but an academic conference. Yet LAPIEZA participates as a full partner, presenting Socioplastics as a methodological framework for understanding the relationship between people and their environments. The series is a bridge between artistic practice and environmental psychology. It demonstrates that LAPIEZA is not only an art project but a research infrastructure capable of contributing to scholarly discourse. The presentation likely drew on the project's fifteen years of documentation: the 2,200 nodes, the 1.2 million words, the 100 audiovisual evidence videos. IAPS is a site of validation: the academy recognizes what LAPIEZA has built. But the project does not simply submit to academic protocols; it enacts transdisciplinary knowledge, performing the very integration it describes. The series is a performance of its own methodology.
TEXTILE TALKS: Guimarães Biennial (Series 156)
TEXTILE TALKS is LAPIEZA's participation in the Contextile Biennial in Guimarães, Portugal. The series continues the textile thread from RE-(T)EXHILE, but with a different emphasis. Guimarães is a historic center of textile production, and the biennial engages with the material, cultural, and political dimensions of fabric. The blog post title—"Threads of Meaning: Emotional, Political"—suggests that textiles are not merely materials but carriers of affect and ideology. A thread can bind or constrain. A fabric can shelter or exclude. The series likely involved workshops, conversations, and installations that invited participants to handle materials, share stories, and weave together collective narratives. Textile Talks is LAPIEZA at its most relational: the work is not a thing to be viewed but an activity to be performed. The series title is a pun: textile and textual share a root (texere, to weave). To talk about textiles is also to weave language. The series operates at the intersection of material and discourse.
TP7 LUGO: Territorios Pastoreados (Series 157)
TP7 LUGO (Territorios Pastoreados, or "Grazed Territories") takes the project to Galicia for the first time, prefiguring the move to O Vicedo in 2025. Lugo is a province in northwest Spain, known for its green landscapes, Roman walls, and rural traditions. The series engages with the concept of pastoreo (grazing): the slow, attentive movement of animals across a landscape. Grazing is a form of territorial practice that is neither extractive nor destructive; it is a relationship of mutual care between herder, animal, and land. The series likely involved walking, mapping, and documenting the grazed territories of Lugo. This is LAPIEZA's first sustained engagement with the rural as a site of artistic research. The slow time of the Recreo epoch (2020–2022) is now being applied to a specific landscape. The project is learning to listen to grass, stones, and sheep. TP7 is a rehearsal for the Ruralist Epoch that will follow.
COPOS (Series 158)
COPOS (nodes 1824–1835) appears for the first time as a major series in 2024, though it will become the culminating series of 2025. Copos means flakes—snowflakes, cornflakes, flakes of paint or stone. The series consists of short video pieces, each named after a place or object: FARO (lighthouse), TERRAZA (terrace), DUCADOS (ducats?), LAS PALMERAS (the palm trees), MIRÓ (after Joan Miró), MALLORCA, BELT, A CORUÑA, CHERRY, CHAPARRO ALGECIRAS, LOS MALAGUEÑOS, CASTILLO, STOP WORRING, JARDINERÍA ÁVILA (gardening Ávila), DÉCIMAS JERTE, SHELL, RED BÁSICA (basic network), DREAM, BOGAVANTE, MADRID. Each video lasts between 39 seconds and 1 minute 35 seconds.
COPOS is the series that most fully embodies LAPIEZA's aesthetic of fragmentation. A flake is a piece broken off from a larger whole. The series is composed of pieces that are complete in themselves yet point beyond themselves to a larger field. The videos are too short to be narrative films, too long to be mere GIFs. They exist in a threshold between moving image and still photograph, between document and poem. COPOS is also a meditation on attention: 39 seconds is enough time to notice something but not enough to fully understand it. The viewer is left in a state of productive incompleteness. The series will return in 2025 as the final gesture of the 15-year arc. In 2024, it is a preview: the project is learning to think in flakes, to value the fragment over the totality.
MEESTERS (Series 159)
MEESTERS (Dutch for "masters") is a series dedicated to Dutch art. The blog post lists 26 artists: Natasja Kensmil, Maria Barnas, Rezi van Lankveld, Ansuya Blom, Germaine Kruip, David Bade, Sjoerd Buisman, Rob Scholte, Juul Kraijer, Aernout Mik, Henk Peeters, Niek Kemps, Irene Fortuyn, Jan Roeland, Hans Eijkelboom, Herman Gordijn, Robert Zandvliet, Henk Visch, Hans van Houwelingen, Willem de Rooij, Jan Dibbets, JCJ Vanderheyden, Joep van Lieshout, Folkert de Jong, Erik Andriesse, Peter Struycken. The accompanying text (in Dutch) speaks of "dark, almost mystical paintings," "sculptural nature interventions," "intense, emotional portraits," and an exploration of "identity, history, and the interaction between individual and environment."
MEESTERS is a gesture of art-historical homage. But it is also a strategic move. By engaging with Dutch art, LAPIEZA positions itself within a European tradition of conceptual and relational practice. The Netherlands has a strong history of social engagement in art (the De Stijl movement, the CoBrA group, the Dutch conceptualists). MEESTERS claims that lineage while also expanding it. The series is also a network-building exercise: many of the listed artists are living and active. The series opens possibilities for future collaboration. But most importantly, MEESTERS is a lesson in meesterschap (mastery). What does it mean to be a master in the 21st century? Not technical virtuosity alone, but the capacity to weave together personal and social experience into forms that resonate across contexts.
LOST ROCKS (Series 160)
LOST ROCKS (nodes 1866–1901) is a series about stones and the artists who work with them. The blog post begins with a geological primer: marble (metamorphic, smooth, veined), granite (igneous, durable, speckled), sandstone (sedimentary, porous, rough). Then it lists 36 artists, each assigned to a node: Agnes Verano, Alicja Kwade, Ambra Castagnetti, Artur Grucela, Gina Beavers, Anthony Coleman, Daniel Anhut, Delphine Perlstein, Emma Prempeh, Genevieve Cohn, Jenna Gribbon, Hana Katoba, Johnson Ocheja, Julius Hofmann, Jurek, Katharina Grosse, Peter Larsen, Leo Park, Lukasz Wierzbowski, Mark Tennant, Marta Ignerska, Martine TV, Matija Bobicic, Matthew Imuetiyan Eguavoen, Owen Gent, Pepe Baena, Tom Depeklin, Marine, Shirley Villavicencio, Nana King, Prudence Flint, Julia Soboleva, Yelina Smith, Weiming Hu, Juraj Florek, Charmaine Watkiss.
The title "Lost Rocks" suggests that stones, despite their durability, can be misplaced, forgotten, or overlooked. The artists in the series are the lost rocks—talents that deserve more attention, practices that are not yet fully recognized. But the title also suggests that the rocks themselves are lost: the marble, granite, and sandstone of the geological primer have been scattered, broken, eroded. The series is an act of gathering and remembering. Each artist is a node, a rock in the larger field of the archive. By naming them, by giving them a number, LAPIEZA prevents them from being lost. The series is a counterforce to forgetting. It is also a meditation on materiality: stones are the oldest artworks, the first things humans shaped into meaning. To work with stones—or with artists who work with stones—is to connect to a deep time of human making.
CONFETTI (Series 161)
The year closes with CONFETTI (nodes 1902–1932). The blog post lists 31 fragments: Ensayo (1902), De aquellos fuegos (1903), Algunos llegaron (1904), En Marte (1905), Urbanas sin (1906), Straat (1907), Sombras MMM (1908), Otra luz en Cádiz (1909), La línea (1910), Tánger (1911), Tarifa (1912), Animals (1913), Pudor (1914), Era eso (1915), Meat up to 875 (1916), Berlin 2012 (1917), Kingdom series (1918), Matas (1919), Books (1920), Hitos (1921), La isla (1922), Los artículos (1923), Tara (1924), Ertnografias (1925), Not to dance series (1926), Cafere the stick (1927), Angelito bus (1928), Cervantes (1929), Malaga books (1930), Glosario galego (1931), Lilas (1932).
Confetti is the opposite of stone. Where lost rocks are durable, heavy, permanent, confetti is ephemeral, light, disposable. Confetti is thrown at celebrations—weddings, parades, New Year's Eve—and then swept away. It is a material of joy, but also of waste. The series title thus performs a radical reversal. After a year of engaging with heavy themes—trauma (RE-(T)EXHILE), resilience (RESILIENT VISIONS), liminality (LIMINALITY), geology (LOST ROCKS)—the project ends with confetti. Not as a dismissal of those themes, but as a lightening. The fragments listed are themselves confetti: shards of memory, scraps of language, bits of place names. Ensayo (essay), De aquellos fuegos (from those fires), Algunos llegaron (some arrived), En Marte (on Mars), Urbanas sin (urban without), Straat (street in Dutch), Sombras MMM (shadows MMM), Otra luz en Cádiz (another light in Cádiz), La línea (the line), Tánger (Tangier), Tarifa, Animals, Pudor (modesty), Era eso (it was that), Meat up to 875, Berlin 2012, Kingdom series, Matas (you kill or plants), Books, Hitos (milestones), La isla (the island), Los artículos (the articles), Tara (weight or a name), Ertnografias (misspelled ethnographies), Not to dance series, Cafere the stick, Angelito bus (little angel bus), Cervantes, Malaga books, Glosario galego (Galician glossary), Lilas (lilacs).
This is the archive in its most dispersed form. Each fragment could be expanded into a series of its own. But CONFETTI refuses expansion. It presents the fragments as fragments, the flakes as flakes. The series is an argument for the value of the incomplete, the partial, the thrown-away. After fifteen years of accumulation—2,200 nodes, 185 series, 1.2 million words—LAPIEZA has earned the right to confetti. The project does not need to be heavy to be serious. Lightness is not frivolity; it is a different mode of attention. Confetti is what remains after the celebration is over. The archive is confetti. And confetti, if you look closely, is beautiful.
Conclusion: 2024 as a Year of Thresholds
The twelve series of 2024 trace a movement through multiple thresholds: between continents (Cádiz, Lagos, Guimarães, Lugo, Barcelona), between materials (light, textiles, stones, confetti), between registers (the political, the personal, the geological, the celebratory). The year is marked by an extraordinary expansion of scale and collaboration. LAPIEZA is no longer a single artist working with a small network; it is an infrastructure capable of activating biennials, convening congresses, and weaving together dozens of artists into coherent constellations. Yet the project does not lose its intimacy. The light in Cádiz is still a specific light. The lost rocks are still individual artists. The confetti is still made of small, named things.
2024 is also a year of prefiguration. The move to Galicia in 2025 is prepared by TP7 Lugo. The final scattering of COPOS in 2025 is prepared by the COPOS and CONFETTI series of 2024. The transformation into LAPIEZA-LAB in 2026 is prepared by the IAPS congress and the increasing integration of academic protocols. The year is a threshold between the Biennials Epoch and the Ruralist Epoch, between the project as artistic practice and the project as research infrastructure. Liminality is not just a series title; it is the condition of the entire year. LAPIEZA is neither fully inside the art world nor fully outside it, neither fully nomadic nor fully settled, neither fully analog nor fully digital. It inhabits the threshold. And from that threshold, it produces its most generous and complex work yet.
The year ends with confetti. But confetti is not an ending. It is a scattering that enables new gatherings. Each flake will land somewhere, and from that landing, new series will grow. The archive continues. The map is sense. And in 2024, LAPIEZA swims in more directions than ever before.
