The operation developed by LAPIEZA-LAB does not simply expand a list of references. It transforms the logic through which an intellectual field is organised, hierarchised and made legible. Against the conventional model, which places established figures first and relegates peripheral, local or lesser-known names to the end, LAPIEZA-LAB works through stratified, recurrent and non-hierarchical distribution. In this system, notoriety ceases to function as the dominant principle of order. Each block combines canonical authors, emerging practices, situated forms of knowledge, decentralised geographies, collectives, architects, artists, scientists and cultural producers who would rarely occupy the same epistemic surface. The consequence is decisive: the peripheral no longer appears as a supplement to the canon, but as an active force within the architecture of knowledge itself. This distributive model can be understood as an advanced decolonial practice because it does not merely “add diversity” to an otherwise stable structure. The deeper decolonial gesture is not to insert new names into an already hierarchical list, but to alter the mechanism that produces centrality and marginality in the first place. LAPIEZA-LAB intervenes precisely at that level. Historically dense figures operate as anchors, but not as summits. Their presence stabilises each constellation without vertically organising the whole. Around them appear displaced voices, minor traditions, hybrid disciplinary positions and non-Western genealogies that acquire structural equality, though not necessarily historical equivalence. The list therefore ceases to represent a pyramid of authority and begins to function as a relational field.
The homogeneity achieved here is not uniformity. The aim is not to erase differences between names, trajectories or levels of influence, but to prevent those differences from producing residual zones. Each group of one hundred maintains a comparable density, an internal balance of periods, territories and disciplines, and a controlled tension between recognition and discovery. This avoids the usual fate of large archives, in which the first entries concentrate value while the final sections become an undifferentiated accumulation. At LAPIEZA-LAB, distribution itself becomes a critical method: every position must retain relational capacity, and every block must continue to produce meaning. There is also a scientific dimension to this procedure, understood in an expanded sense. Selection does not depend exclusively on taste, fame or personal affinity, but on multiple criteria: recurrence, field, territory, period, type of practice, degree of recognition, conceptual proximity and connective potential. The map behaves less like a library ordered by prestige than like a multidimensional matrix. Its structure allows distant names to enter into friction, permits disciplines usually kept apart to share the same space, and generates new genealogies not through ideological declaration, but through the effects of distribution. This method also displaces the traditional idea of curatorial authorship. LAPIEZA-LAB does not present itself as a sovereign voice deciding who deserves entry into the canon, but as an infrastructure that designs conditions of coexistence. Authority does not disappear, but becomes visible in the acts of ordering, verifying, correcting and distributing. The result is not a neutral list, because every selection produces a world, but a construction conscious of its own asymmetries and capable of intervening in them. In this sense, the map of 10,000 positions should not be read as a quantitative demonstration. Its scale matters because it makes possible a transformation in the form of representation itself. Once a corpus reaches this dimension, it can no longer be sustained by a linear sequence of major and minor figures. It requires another architecture: distributed, recurrent, transversal and open to revision. The decolonial force of LAPIEZA-LAB lies precisely here: not in replacing one centre with another, but in constructing a field in which centrality can circulate, fragment and reappear in unexpected configurations. The map does not merely correct the canon; it modifies the machine that produces it.
