The fifteen-year trajectory of LAPIEZA (2009–2025) represents a profound topological journey, transforming from a physical laboratory in Madrid into a global nomadic infrastructure and, finally, a ruralist school in Galicia. Across 180 series and 2,200 pieces, the project has maintained a rigorous rhythm of "socioplastics," where art is treated not as a static object but as a living, breathing duration. The Foundational Epoch (2009–2012) established this rhythm at Palma 15, Madrid, where weekly mutations in a domestic setting challenged the traditional white cube, emphasizing that art begins with a gesture of departure—the EXIT. This was followed by the Expansive Epoch (2013–2019), where the project shed its walls to become a nomadic body, drifting through international residencies from Mexico to Oslo and translating local textures into "affective geometries." The arrival of the Recreo Epoch (2020–2022) marked a fertile retreat into the rural landscape of Ávila, shifting the focus to "slow time" and the "body-landscape," where the archive began to breathe through vegetal gestures and the processing of symbolic depth. The Biennials Epoch (2023–2024) saw a re-emergence into the global scene, with LAPIEZA acting as a post-institutional agency in platforms like the Lagos Biennial, mediating between ecological networks and territorial activation. Finally, the Ruralist Epoch (2025–Present) finds the project anchored in O Vicedo, Galicia, where the territory itself becomes the classroom and the archive dissolves into the environment. The transition from the first piece of EXIT to the final scattering of COPOS proves that LAPIEZA is not a collection of works, but a fifteen-year exhalation that continues to flake into the common landscape.
I. Foundational Epoch (2009–2012): The Room as Laboratory. LAPIEZA was born in 2009 as an independent space in the Malasaña neighborhood of Madrid, conceived not just as a gallery but as a living organism. During its first four years, the mutation was weekly: every Thursday a new work, every week a new series. This vertiginous rhythm consolidated the notion of socioplastics: a symbiotic form of work where what is exhibited is not just an object, but also a gesture, document, body, and narrative. The installation becomes a language, and the room a laboratory. The series of this phase—EXIT, KIWI, BAZAR, SALES, FAMILY, SOCIOPLASTICS—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. The Madrid scene welcomed the project as a strange but fertile gesture, overflowing traditional categories of contemporary art. 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. 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. Each place contributed a texture, each series a variation of the gesture. The body of work unfolded in series such as COCKTAIL, PHANTOM, SWEET CORN BRUTALISM, THE WORD, OIL & STONE, ZORRA, PLUMA, LAUREL, or GLASS, which translated affective architectures, social contexts, and local languages into objectual and choreographic forms. Residencies became forms of situated artistic research, where the installation no longer imposed itself but listened and responded. The international network expanded, not as an institutional strategy, but as a practice of critical hospitality. In Mexico, Jesus Leon and the Zorrita consolidated a transverse aesthetic complicity. In Bogotá, street spaces were activated. In Marseille and Croatia, the dialogue with architecture took a minimal and political form. Work was done on the margin, in the intimate, in the tactile. This stage was prolific: more than 500 pieces in 60 series. The notion of the series was refined as a narrative unit, as an affective core. New documentation methodologies were tested, including the scenic, the editorial, and the performative. LAPIEZA became an expanded archive, more choreography than catalog. At the edge of 2020, the network mutated into a pause: RECREO was born, and with it, the need to inhabit the slow. Thus began the third phase: introspection, landscape, and density.
III. 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 pieces no longer followed one another with urgency: they now 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. In this phase, series such as RECREO, LAGOA, TRONCO, BASAL, or THE ROAD TO RESTORATION were born, insisting on the articulation between body, landscape, and language. The work is not exhibited, it is lived. It is not projected, it sediments. The archive is transformed into breath, and the documentation takes on a poetic and organic tone. Each piece is a record of presence. The link with the rural is not only physical but epistemological. The rhythm of moss, the logic of the mountain, slowness as politics are investigated. LAPIEZA thus tested a pedagogy of time, a poetics of being. The global crisis of the pandemic did not stop the work: it made it more porous, more tactile, more silent. By the end of 2022, this phase left a legacy of symbolic depth. The fourth epoch then opened: the entry onto the world stage, with biennials, platforms, and new territories.
IV. 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 and Contextile Guimarães, among other platforms, and articulated 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—FLOTANTES, PAISAJE VASO, INVERNO DE PEDRA, COPOS, PSICAMB, HORTUS, TP7, among others—developed an aesthetic that combines lightness and density. The pieces relate to water, climate, the invisible, the symbolic, and the ecological. Collaborations were opened with biennials, congresses, and territorial networks, such as in Territorios Pastoreados or Lugo Emerxe, where art functions as a critical mediation of the territory. In this stage, socioplastics is redefined as a post-institutional language. Museography becomes a tool for listening, and the archive manifests as a constellation of gestures, texts, bodies, materials, and affects. The documentation acquired a choral, shared, multiple character. The works no longer belong 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. In 2025, with the move to Galicia and the installation in O Vicedo, a new epoch began: the ruralist time, where the territory becomes archive, school, and gesture.
V. 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 is fixed in O Vicedo, between the mountain and the sea, where the agency reconfigures itself as a rural archipelago. This gesture is not just a geographic change, but an epistemological one: it is about living art as listening to a place, as a form of situated knowledge and symbolic intervention in the common. The first actions of this stage—such as SAN ROQUE, PSICAMB 2025, BANCAL, SVERIGE10, and NIGONHO—do not seek to occupy the territory but to let themselves be transformed by it. A policy of slow attention is activated: the names of the pieces are filled with toponymy, vegetation, climate, rivers, stones, and fog. Socioplastics now becomes a ruralist relational form, closer to the essay, the minimal gesture, and the shared ritual. The link between art and education is reactivated with a clear public vocation. LAPIEZA becomes a diffuse school, a laboratory of aesthetic thought in relation to landscape, memory, and ecology. The rural is not the opposite of the urban, but its critical fold, its mirror. Each piece is inscribed in a choreography of affects, words, and materials that weave the personal and the collective. Thus begins a new decade of transdisciplinary work. From Galicia, the agency projects its work toward new calls, linguistic cartographies, and interventions in the common. This phase does not close the previous ones: it reorders them, networks them, and updates them as a living archive. LAPIEZA thus enters its fifth mutation: an expanded art school where the territory is the classroom and affect is the critical tool.
