:::::::::::::::::::::::::: Anto Lloveras: THE ENGINE OF AIR, BORDERS AND REHEARSED CITIES: HOW IMAGES, SYSTEMS AND DISPLACED BODIES LEARN TO HOLD A COMMON FIELD

Saturday, July 11, 2026

THE ENGINE OF AIR, BORDERS AND REHEARSED CITIES: HOW IMAGES, SYSTEMS AND DISPLACED BODIES LEARN TO HOLD A COMMON FIELD

Reyner Banham understood that modern architecture could not be read only through façades, styles and heroic plans, because air-conditioning, mobility, media, deserts and machines had already entered the building as decisive authors. Christian Norberg-Schulz searched, in a more phenomenological key, for the existential ground of place, while Leonardo Benevolo and Rahul Mehrotra kept the city close to history, informality and public life rather than letting it dissolve into abstract planning diagrams. Fernando Carrión and Peter Adey move that urban argument toward borders, movement and security, where the city is no longer a stable container but a pressure system: flows of bodies, capital, fear, police, climate and infrastructure. Hugh Ferriss drew future skyscrapers as if they were civic mountains emerging from shadow; Germain Boffrand and Phidias remind us that architecture and sculpture have always staged authority through mass, ornament and bodily proportion. Mauricio Rocha, Alireza Taghaboni, Sabine von Fischer and Ann-Sofi Rönnskog keep the same problem open in contemporary terms, asking how buildings, territories and atmospheric systems become legible when their true object is not form alone but the conditions that make form politically useful.

The image enters that built field as both ornament and weapon. Giovanni Bellini, Raphael and Pontormo each show a different temperature of Renaissance order: devotional stillness, compositional sovereignty, and finally a crisis of torsion where bodies no longer trust the world that holds them. Lyubov Popova and György Kepes carry the image into constructivism, perception and visual research, where composition becomes an apparatus for reorganizing modern attention. T. J. Clark reads painting as social history under pressure, while Lynn Zelevansky, Koyo Kouoh and Data Feminism insist that the archive is never neutral: it has curators, absences, formats, exclusions and computational habits. Malick Sidibé and Hippolyte Bayard make photography a theatre of modern appearance and technical invention; Lee Miller folds beauty into war, Fiona Pardington turns the photographic object toward ancestry and spectral return, and Keisha Scarville bends family image, Caribbean memory and black maternal absence into a dense grammar of cloth, portrait and remnant.

Sound, meanwhile, refuses to remain secondary. Karlheinz Stockhausen treated electronic composition as a cosmic laboratory; Christian Marclay built time out of sampled fragments, records, clocks and cinematic debris; Jennifer Higdon and Mica Levi show two very different ways for composition to carry intensity without surrendering to inherited decorum. Lina Lapelytė, Simone Forti and David Hominal move sound and body through performance, where gesture becomes a score and duration becomes an unstable architecture. Nick Cave’s wearable soundsuits, FAFSWAG’s queer Indigenous performativity, Wu Tsang’s cinematic and performative collaborations, and Pauline Curnier Jardin’s carnivalesque dramaturgies turn identity away from static representation and toward staged transformation. In that register, the body is never simply present; it is produced by costume, rhythm, camera, institution, gender, kinship and the collective gaze that either permits or refuses its visibility.

Politics arrives not as a separate theme but as the condition under which every form becomes accountable. Andrew Abbott’s sociology of professions and Akhil Gupta’s anthropology of bureaucracy show how institutions classify, delay and distribute life through procedures that often appear ordinary precisely because they are powerful. Meredith Whittaker brings that institutional question into artificial intelligence and corporate technics, where data systems reorganize labor, surveillance and public accountability. Suely Rolnik, Sandro Mezzadra and Jason Hickel pressure the field from desire, borders and degrowth: subjectivity, migration and extractive economics are not peripheral topics but the material from which contemporary worlds are built. Samir Amin and Jagdish Bhagwati sit in productive tension around development, dependency, trade and global hierarchy; John Henrik Clarke adds the historical demand that African and diasporic knowledge not be treated as a supplement to a European story already written.

That pressure produces literature as witness. Beowulf, Émile Zola, Osamu Dazai, Robert Walser, Almudena Grandes, Diana Abu-Jaber, Juan José Saer, Siri Hustvedt, Amit Chaudhuri, Sia Figiel and Norah Lange do not share a style, period or geography, yet each turns writing into an instrument for measuring what official history cannot hold cleanly: epic survival, industrial injustice, alienated interiority, miniature perception, civil war memory, migration, Argentine time, embodied consciousness, musical prose, Pacific cosmology and avant-garde intimacy. Amiri Baraka and Allen Ginsberg make the poem public, abrasive and sounded; Franny Choi brings technological and racialized futurity into lyric form; Augusto de Campos and Tomaso Binga make the page itself a visual field where language acquires body. Vilém Mathesius, Xunzi and Utpaladeva widen the grammar: linguistic function, ethical cultivation and Kashmiri aesthetic-philosophical consciousness remind us that thought is always already formal, trained, voiced and situated.

Science and model-making extend the same field beyond the human room. Nicolaus Copernicus and Hermann Minkowski changed the coordinates in which bodies could be imagined at all; Mary Anning and Alois Alzheimer made deep time and damaged cognition visible through patient observation. Fei-Fei Li’s work on computer vision belongs here not as technological triumphalism but as a question about how machines learn categories from human worlds already saturated with bias, labor and image. Will Wright and Anna Ridler approach systems through play and dataset, exposing rule, feedback and pattern as cultural material. Heman Chong’s bureaucratic fictions, Basurama’s work with waste, Eve Mosher’s climate-line intervention and Alia Farid’s attention to water, oil, territory and civic memory all insist that models are never innocent abstractions: they draw lines, assign risk, create visibility and often decide who must live with the consequence.

Cinema gives those consequences duration. Steve McQueen, Hlynur Pálmason, George Roy, Kira Muratova, Ben Russell, John Carpenter, Fernando Solanas, Josh and Benny Safdie, Zeinabu Irene Davis and Subversive Film each work a different edge of the moving image: historical violence, elemental landscape, documentary memory, Soviet dissonance, ethnographic experiment, genre anxiety, militant cinema, urban compression, Black feminist film and archival counter-circulation. The Wooster Group breaks theatre into media fragments until performance behaves like a haunted editing room. Germaine Kruip and Eugènia Balcells turn light, perception and apparatus into sculptural events; Christo transforms wrapping into civic attention; Michel de Broin makes objects misbehave with dry intelligence; Germaine Kruip’s shadow and reflection meet Christian Marclay’s time and John Carpenter’s dread as if the screen, the room and the street were variations of a single optical machine.

Objects, finally, return the argument to material stubbornness. Parviz Tanavoli’s sculptural language, Victor Grippo’s potatoes and tables of energy, Ida Applebroog’s sharp feminist figuration, Anna Ridler’s machine-learning florals, Enkelejd Zonja’s painted ambiguities and Matija Bobičić’s exaggerated figures all treat matter as a thinking surface. Frans Masereel’s woodcut novels prove that sequential image can become social literature without cinema; Lola Fernández, George Roy Hill’s cinematic namesake would be another path, but here George Roy’s documentary trace keeps film close to factual assembly rather than auteur myth. Mary Anning’s fossils, Basurama’s residues and Barry Commoner’s ecological logic — present as an inherited pressure even where unnamed in this sequence — teach the same lesson: nothing disappears simply because a culture stops looking at it.

What holds these one hundred entries together is not a theme but a method of adjacency. Architecture touches bureaucracy; bureaucracy touches data; data touches lyric; lyric touches migration; migration touches climate; climate touches cinema; cinema touches the older image; the older image returns as a building, a costume, a fossil, a score, a wound. The list becomes useful only when it stops behaving like a list and begins to act as a chamber of relations. Every name here leaves a public trace that can be checked, corrected and re-entered. That traceability is the ethical minimum. The stronger task is to let those traces produce a grammar of perception: one capable of reading cities as atmospheres, images as institutions, bodies as archives, and knowledge itself as a constructed environment where distant materials can meet without being flattened into sameness.

Bibliograhy

Project Index
https://antolloveras.blogspot.com/p/socioplastics-project-index.html
Anto Lloveras — Socioplastics — LAPIEZA-LAB

with

Reyner Banham, Andrew Abbott, Leonardo Benevolo, Fernando Carrión, Augusto de Campos, Hugh Ferriss, Akhil Gupta, György Kepes, Christian Marclay, Christian Norberg-Schulz, Suely Rolnik, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Meredith Whittaker, Peter Adey, Sandro Mezzadra, Sverker Sörlin, Beowulf, Giovanni Bellini, Lyubov Popova, Raphael, Amiri Baraka, Basurama, T. J. Clark, Alia Farid, Jason Hickel, Germaine Kruip, Rahul Mehrotra, Fiona Pardington, Keisha Scarville, Wu Tsang, Lynn Zelevansky, Germain Boffrand, Pontormo, Simone Forti, David Hominal, Lina Lapelytė, Lee Miller, FAFSWAG, Josh Safdie and Benny Safdie, Parviz Tanavoli, Émile Zola, Matija Bobičić, Pauline Curnier Jardin, Lola Fernández, Jennifer Higdon, Koyo Kouoh, Steve McQueen, Hlynur Pálmason, George Roy, Alireza Taghaboni, Enkelejd Zonja, Phidias, Data Feminism, Christo, Malick Sidibé, Hippolyte Bayard, Tomaso Binga, Heman Chong, Anna Ridler, Allen Ginsberg, Nicolaus Copernicus, Hermann Minkowski, Mary Anning, Alois Alzheimer, Samir Amin, Jagdish Bhagwati, Vilém Mathesius, Xunzi, Utpaladeva, John Henrik Clarke, Fei-Fei Li, Frans Masereel, Mica Levi, Mauricio Rocha, Osamu Dazai, Nick Cave, Eve Mosher, Kira Muratova, Will Wright, Franny Choi, Sabine von Fischer, Ben Russell, John Carpenter, Michel de Broin, Amit Chaudhuri, Ida Applebroog, Víctor Grippo, Diana Abu-Jaber, Juan José Saer, Siri Hustvedt, Ann-Sofi Rönnskog, Fernando Solanas, Almudena Grandes, Robert Walser, The Wooster Group, Eugènia Balcells, Zeinabu Irene Davis, Subversive Film, Sia Figiel, Norah Lange