What began in 2009 as a weekly mutation in a Madrid living room—a domestic laboratory where art was not exhibited but lived, where each Thursday brought a new series and each gesture was documented as relational evidence—has, fifteen years later, reconstituted itself as LAPIEZA-LAB: a sovereign, self-governing university of thought, complete with persistent identifiers, machine-readable metadata, and a closed-loop epistemic architecture. This is not a simple evolution. It is a stratigraphic inversion. The trajectory from EXIT (node 001) to COPOS / THE END OF AN ERA (node 2200) traces the transformation of experimental relational art into explicit research infrastructure. And in that transformation lies the project's singular contribution to contemporary practice: demonstrating that long-term curatorial practice can accumulate enough internal coherence to become infrastructure without abandoning its artistic nature. The fifteen-year arc spans 185 series and over 2,200 nodes, encompassing more than 1000 audiovisual evidence videos, 20 foundational books, and 17 annual Lab Reports. It has engaged over 300 artists from more than 20 countries, from Madrid to Mexico, from Lagos to Oslo, from Athens to Ávila. It has operated as a physical room, a nomadic body, a rural retreat, a biennial participant, and finally a digital infrastructure. It has been documented on blogs, on YouTube, on Zenodo, on Wikidata. It has been cited, numbered, and archived. And it has done all of this without ever losing its essential character: a practice of relation, a laboratory of encounter, a machine for producing connections. This essay is a synthesis of that fifteen-year journey. It is organized not chronologically but thematically, tracing the five epochs that structure the project's development, the key concepts that animate its practice, and the singular contribution that makes LAPIEZA-LAB unique in the landscape of contemporary art.
Part One: The Five Epochs
I. The Foundational Epoch (2009–2012): The Room as Laboratory
LAPIEZA was born in 2009 as an independent space at Palma 15 in Madrid's Malasaña neighborhood. It was not conceived as a gallery but as a living organism. The weekly mutation was the rhythm: every Thursday a new series, every week a new set of nodes. This vertiginous pace consolidated the notion of socioplastics: a symbiotic form of work where what is exhibited is not just an object but a gesture, a document, a body, a narrative. The installation becomes a language. The room becomes a laboratory.
The series of this phase—EXIT, BAZAR, MOSCA, KIWI, SOCIOPLASTICS, SALES, FIRE, BALL, PAN, FASTFORWARD—draw an aesthetic map that intertwines the ephemeral, the domestic, and the affective. The work does not seek to remain but to resonate: what matters is the bond it generates. This stage was marked by an economy of resources and an abundance of ideas, where material precarity was transformed into conceptual power. The collective, the immediate, and the relational were vital axes. This first cycle laid the foundations for a rhizomatic archive, with more than 500 pieces and a rigorous method of photographic, textual, and performative documentation. With the closure of the physical room in 2012, LAPIEZA began its drift toward the mobile. A contained, intense, and seminal stage thus closed, making way for the second epoch: geographic and narrative expansion.
II. The Expansive Epoch (2013–2019): Drifts, Residencies, and Affective Geometries
Between 2013 and 2019, LAPIEZA became a nomadic device, a body in transit that shifted its power toward multiple geographies. No longer having a fixed room, the project mutated into a relational network and an archive in motion. This phase lasted seven years, marking a profound symbolic, material, and geographic expansion. Cádiz, Mexico, Croatia, Bogotá, Marseille, Oslo, Bratislava, Amsterdam, Stockholm, Athens. Each place contributed a texture, each series a variation of the gesture.
The series of this phase—BULLET, VULCANO, DESEO, SYSTEM, EXPANSIVO, NETA, KISS, NOWHERE, ANTORCHA, GOMA, ENSAYOS POSICIONALES, STRUCTURAL CONVERSATIONS, FRESH MUSEUM, SUGAR SUNSET, NAKED EYE, AERIAL ROOTS, BANK ACCOUNT, THICK SMOKE, ZERO ZERO, BUTTER FACTORY, SWEET CORN BRUTALISM, INCISIONS AND DISSECTIONS, EXFOLIATION, WILD FLOWERS, THE WORD, ARTNATIONS, FLOCK, THE LIGHT IN ATHENS —translated local architectures and social energies into objectual and choreographic forms. Residencies became forms of situated artistic research. The international network expanded not as an institutional strategy but as a practice of critical hospitality.
During this phase, the project began to understand that its seriality was not merely productive but structural. The recurrence of motifs, the cross-linking of media and places, the oscillation between intimacy and scale: all contributed to a coherence that was not imposed but emergent. LAPIEZA was becoming a system without yet naming itself as one. The Athens sequence of 2019—18 nodes from Kypseli to Poseidon—demonstrated a new capacity for urban reading: the city accessed not through monuments but through rooms, gestures, minor encounters, and infrastructural frictions.
III. The Recreo Epoch (2020–2022): Slow Time, Body Landscape, Living Archive
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 rise to the RECREO series. This term does not refer to leisure, but to creating again. A new time was established: slow, atmospheric, linked to listening to the landscape and the sedimentation of the archive as a living body.
The series of this phase—RECREO, FRONTLINE SPACESHIP, THE ROAD TO RESTORATION, BASAL, SOLITUDE, UNSTABLE LOVE, GREY, DEEP SLEEP, LA MAR —emerged from walks, minimal observations, almost invisible acts. The work concentrated on the production of small-scale symbolic actions, intimate but documented with precision. A deep affective dimension was activated, where the gesture became almost vegetal, rooted to the ground. The memory of the project took root.
The ROAD TO RESTORATION (2021) consisted of 40 short films—from WAR to WAIT BEHIND—that merged choreography with natural landscapes, becoming a testament to the healing influence of nature. DEEP SLEEP (2022) defended the necessity of rest as a condition of learning. BASAL (2022) attended to foundations: plants, stones, food, meat, cement, color, bars, bags, cities, dances, wakefulness. The archive learned to breathe. The shift from accumulation to infrastructure did not begin in 2026. It began in 2020, in the silence of Ávila, when LAPIEZA realized that its duration had become its primary material.
IV. The Biennials Epoch (2023–2024): Institutional Openings and Global Scene
After the retreat of RECREO, LAPIEZA burst back 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, Contextile Guimarães, and other platforms, articulating a multiple, simultaneous, and relational presence. The scene was no longer a room or a landscape, but a mobile affective infrastructure operating as a network for territorial activation.
The series of this phase—SORROW, RELIEVE, RERO POP, RETRO EXPRESSIONISM, VOYAGE VOYAGE, LOOP, RADIANCE, TAR, NATURE BOY, PRIME FACTOR 3X, THE LIGHT IN CÁDIZ, RE-(T)EXHILE, RESILIENT VISIONS, TRA(D)ICIONES, LIMINALITY, IAPS, TEXTILE TALKS, TP7 LUGO, COPOS, MEESTERS, LOST ROCKS, CONFETTI —developed an aesthetic that combines lightness and density. The works relate to water, climate, the invisible, the symbolic, and the ecological. Collaborations opened with biennials, congresses, and territorial networks, where art functions as a critical mediation of the territory.
In this stage, socioplastics was redefined as a post-institutional language. Museography became a tool for listening, and the archive manifested as a constellation of gestures, texts, bodies, materials, and affects. The documentation acquired a choral, shared, multiple character. The works no longer belonged to a closed authorship but to a system of active relationships. The educational turn was also accentuated: videos, podcasts, publications, and roundtables were produced, extending the radius of action of each piece. LAPIEZA entered the scene as an expanded agency inhabiting the pedagogical, the curatorial, and the political.
V. The Ruralist Epoch (2025): Affective Archipelagos and School of Territory
With the move to Galicia in 2025, LAPIEZA inaugurated a new phase: territorial, affective, and pedagogical. The headquarters became fixed in O Vicedo, between the mountain and the sea, where the agency reconfigured itself as a rural archipelago. This gesture was not just a geographic change, but an epistemological one: it was about living art as listening to a place, as a form of situated knowledge and symbolic intervention in the common. The series of this phase—LA LUZ EN CÁDIZ, PSICAMB, BEAUCOUP, MERCI, PARLONS CINEMA, SAN ROQUE, CLASS ACT, BRASIL, MIÑOCA, HORTUS, CUENTOS, INVERNO DE PEDRA, ESTRUGAS E FENTOS, TURTLE VISIONS, TRAPECIO, NIGONHO, SVERIGE, BANCAL, SUMMER ON, SUMMER OFF, EGO TRIPS, CÁDIZ OTOÑO, and finally COPOS / THE END OF AN ERA —did not seek to occupy the territory but to let themselves be transformed by it. A policy of slow attention was activated: the names of the pieces filled with toponymy, vegetation, climate, rivers, stones, and fog. Socioplastics became a ruralist relational form, closer to the essay, the minimal gesture, and the shared ritual. COPOS (flakes) consisted of 20 short video pieces—FARO, TERRAZA, DUCADOS, LAS PALMERAS, MIRÓ, MALLORCA, BELT, A CORUÑA, CHERRY, CHAPARRO ALGECIRAS, LOS MALAGUEÑOS, CASTILLO, STOP WORRING, JARDINERÍA ÁVILA, DÉCIMAS JERTE, SHELL, RED BÁSICA, DREAM, BOGAVANTE, MADRID—each lasting between 39 seconds and 1 minute 35 seconds. The title means flakes: discrete, ephemeral units that together form a larger field. THE END OF AN ERA signaled the closure of the fifteen-year arc from EXIT (2009) to this final scattering. The archive was complete: 185 series, 2,200 nodes, 1.2 million words. LAPIEZA had crossed from cultural production into epistemic infrastructure.
Part Two: The Key Concepts
Socioplastics (SOCIOPLÁSTICA)
At the heart of LAPIEZA is a methodology termed Socioplastics, which draws inspiration from Joseph Beuys's social sculpture and Nicolas Bourriaud's relational aesthetics. Socioplastics treats art not as a discrete artifact but as a catalyst for social relations, seeking to increase humanistic symbolic capital within a society dominated by post-industrial commodity systems. The work is neither object-bound nor author-centric but emerges through iterative encounters, dialogic exchanges, and contingent assemblages. Using digital networks as a site for "relational insurgency," the project merges the legitimation of museum spaces with the mass diffusion of social networks, treating time as the primary material and the archive as a living organism.
Seriality as Method
LAPIEZA's most distinctive feature is its use of seriality as a generative structure. The project did not simply produce a large number of works; it produced a large number of series, each numbered, each named, each functioning as a discrete research unit. The numbering system—from 001 to 2200—converts the archive into measurable, citable terrain. Each title functions simultaneously as poetic condensation and empirical coordinate. The chronology is not ancillary documentation but the very substance of the work: a cartography of continuity in which naming, counting, and sequencing become curatorial acts.
The Archive as Infrastructure
The shift from ARTNATIONS (2017) to FLOCK (2018) to LAPIEZA-LAB (2026) traces the project's growing self-awareness as an infrastructure. The archive is no longer a passive memory bank but an active analytic surface. The serial logic, the numbering, the recurrence of motifs, the cross-linking of media and places—all become part of a field architecture. LAPIEZA-LAB operates as a sovereign platform where curating becomes method, publication becomes construction, and accumulated practice becomes a legible transdisciplinary system. Not a museum of past works, but a working laboratory for the ongoing production of Socioplastics.
The Node as Unit
The node is the fundamental unit of the LAPIEZA archive. Each node is a post, a document, an encounter, a gesture. Each node has a number. Each node is linked to other nodes. The node is the atom of the relational field. The node is the citizen of the nation of art. The node is the flake in the snow, the drop in the ocean, the star in the galaxy. The node is the project's answer to the question: what is the smallest unit of relation? The answer: a number, a name, a link. The node is 001. The node is 2200. The node is everything in between.
The Series as Container
The series is the container that holds the nodes. Each series has a name, a node range, a thematic or methodological orientation. The series is the project's primary mode of organization. It is the beam, the column, the foundation. It is the frame that holds the archive together. The series is the project's answer to the question: how do you structure a relational field? The answer: you name it, you number it, you fill it with nodes. The series is EXIT. The series is COPOS. The series is everything in between.
Part Three: The Singular Contribution
What makes LAPIEZA original is not simply its longevity, nor the number of its series, nor even its transnational spread, but the fact that it invented a curatorial form that behaves less like an exhibition program than like a self-expanding research organism. Most curatorial platforms alternate between event production and documentation, treating the archive as a secondary residue. LAPIEZA inverted that hierarchy. It made seriality itself into the medium, so that accumulation was never administrative but conceptual. The numbered sequences, the shifting titles, the geographical dispersions, the oscillation between intimacy and scale—all contributed to a structure in which continuity became form. LAPIEZA did not only curate works; it curated duration, density, and relation. It dissolved the border between art space, discursive platform, and distributed publication system. A series such as Fresh Museum, Artnations, Flock, Liminality, or Bancal was never reducible to a conventional exhibition identity. Each title opened a temporary zone where artworks, texts, images, travels, correspondences, and social energies were gathered into a public that was unstable yet legible. The exhibition ceased to be a closed room and became instead a moving field, capable of inhabiting blogs, conversations, territories, biennials, relational contexts, and archival afterlives with equal intensity.
What is equally distinctive is that LAPIEZA generated a rigorous internal order without becoming rigid. Its numbering system, series logic, and recurrent formal discipline produced coherence, yet the content remained mutable, porous, and responsive. That balance is difficult to achieve. Many long-running projects either collapse into repetition or dissolve into inconsistency. LAPIEZA managed to turn repetition into difference-producing structure. Each new series echoed the previous ones while displacing their meaning, allowing the whole corpus to grow as a stratified body rather than as a pile of unrelated gestures.
Ultimately, LAPIEZA is original because it transformed curating into an infrastructural practice. It proposed that the real artwork may not be the individual object, nor even the single exhibition, but the long-duration system that enables relations, memory, circulation, and conceptual thickening to occur. In this sense, its archive is not merely documentation of what happened. It is the material proof that a curatorial project can become a field of thought in its own right: persistent, self-organizing, and structurally inventive.
Part Four: The Infrastructural Inversion (2026)
In 2026, the project performed its most radical move: the retroactive reclassification of the entire corpus as LAPIEZA-LAB. What once appeared as an expansive constellation of more than 180 series was reconstituted as a coherent research infrastructure. The "Art Series" nomenclature was replaced by the logic of the Field Engine. The archive of 2,200 nodes was secured within a machine-readable and academically citable system through the methodical deployment of persistent identifiers, including DOIs and RORs. The material was arranged into annual English-language records on Zenodo, acquiring the formal consistency of a serial scientific publication. The twenty foundational books, the one hundred audiovisual evidence videos, and the seventeen annual Lab Reports no longer function as parallel outputs but as mutually reinforcing layers within a single operative system.
This is the inversion. The laboratory was not a plan. It was a retrospective discovery. LAPIEZA did not set out to build an infrastructure; it built one through the sheer consistency of its practice, and then, fifteen years later, recognized what it had built. The term LAB does not cancel the former identity but consolidates it at a higher level of intelligibility. Seriality becomes method. Repetition becomes analytic depth. Curatorial practice becomes a mode of knowledge construction rather than mere exhibitionary sequencing. The archive is no longer a passive memory bank but an active analytic surface. LAPIEZA-LAB names the moment when duration acquires full theoretical consciousness: a mature phase in which the former proliferation of series is recognized as the operative geology of an enduring, self-producing system of artistic and curatorial research. What distinguishes LAPIEZA-LAB is that it does not abandon the artistic body of work in order to become research. It reads that body differently. Series, films, installations, essays, actions, urban projects, and pedagogical devices are treated as research units, each carrying evidence, method, and transferable concepts.
Conclusion: The Map Is Sense
LAPIEZA-LAB is unique because it shows that a fifteen-year exhalation can be retroactively recognized as a university. The map is sense, and we swim in all directions. But the swimming, it turns out, was always already a form of navigation. The laboratory was there from the beginning—in the weekly mutations of a Madrid living room, in the numbering of nodes, in the patient accumulation of series, in the bread bowl of Athens, in the double face that is never identical, in the twenty flakes of COPOS. The project began with an EXIT. It ended with COPOS. Between them, 185 series, 2,200 nodes,300 artists, 20 countries, 15 years. The archive is not a monument. It is a machine. The machine is not finished. It is still running. The nodes are still being numbered. The series are still being named. The relations are still being documented. LAPIEZA-LAB is not a tomb. It is a laboratory. And the laboratory is open.
