Urban Taxidermy is not a closed series, but the recovered visible spine of a much larger body of almost one thousand urban actions, objects, videos, cuts, props, walks and unstable installations developed by Anto Lloveras through LAPIEZA between 2011 and 2026. The project begins in Madrid, around Calle Palma and the LAPIEZA gallery context, as an open sequence of street-based gestures, provisional objects and material interruptions. From that first urban laboratory, the work expands through galleries, cities and improvised situations across Europe, gradually transforming the street into a dissected surface and the found object into a living specimen. The Taxidermy works operate through a simple but persistent method: cutting, extracting, suspending, displaying, relocating and re-reading fragments of the city. Bags, fabrics, skins, residues, props, signs, soft materials and urban remains are treated neither as sculpture in the classical sense nor as documentation alone. They become anatomical evidence. The city is approached as an animal body: wounded, folded, porous, unstable and still alive. Each intervention performs a minimal incision into the visible order of everyday space.
MEAT forms the carnal prehistory of this system. It introduces repetition, rawness, accumulation and the fragile power of the single image. Fragile Urban Anatomies clarifies this logic: a small cut can interrupt the city’s surface, expose inner tension and leave behind a scar that continues to circulate in public life. Taxidermy gives that gesture a more explicit exhibition grammar. In London, Madrid, France, Norway, Berlin and Croatia, the method becomes installational, architectural and archival. The gallery no longer neutralises the street object; it allows the urban fragment to appear as a specimen of spatial memory. The series later reappears in more discreet forms. In Double Sided, Taxidermy enters as a minimal scenic presence inside another performance system, beside the Yellow Bag, the blanket and other mobile props. There it no longer needs to dominate the scene. It acts almost silently, as a small residue within a larger choreography of bodies, objects and repetitions. This is important: the work proves that Taxidermy is not only an exhibition format, but a transferable grammar. It can become wall, prop, scar, cut, index, body, pause or witness. Its new organisation into three books within Socioplastics Tome VI functions as a form of recognition. The 300 linked TomotoTomoto labels do not claim to catalogue the whole archive. Many actions were never tagged, some exist twice, some remain only as video, and others will belong to future recoveries. The three books simply stabilise what is already visible: an indexed sequence of urban taxidermies, from early register to middle body to updated present. Urban Taxidermy therefore names a long practice of making the city legible through its fragments. It is an archive of incisions, a performative anatomy of public space, and a bridge between LAPIEZA’s early open series, Tomoto’s numbered actions and the systemic architecture of Socioplastics. What began as small cuts in Madrid now becomes a three-book archival structure: not a monument, but a living taxonomy of urban remains.
Socioplastics Project Index
https://antolloveras.blogspot.com/p/socioplastics-project-index.html
Socioplastics Start Here
https://antolloveras.blogspot.com/p/socioplastics-start-here.html
Socioplastics Field Map
https://antolloveras.blogspot.com/2026/06/socioplastics-field-map.html
Socioplastics Books
https://antolloveras.blogspot.com/p/socioplastics-books.html
Taxidermy — London: The City Is an Animal
https://antolloveras.blogspot.com/2026/01/taxidermy-london-city-is-animal.html
Taxidermy III — Cutting the City Back to Life
https://antolloveras.blogspot.com/2026/01/taxidermy-iii-cutting-city-back-to.html
Fragile Urban Anatomies
https://antolloveras.blogspot.com/2026/01/fragile-urban-anatomies.html
Double Sided Reinvents Performance
https://antolloveras.blogspot.com/2026/01/double-sided-reinvents-performance.html
