:::::::::::::::::::::::::: Anto Lloveras: THE GROUND BENEATH THE MODEL: CAPITAL, MIGRATION, TECHNICAL IMAGINATION AND THE ARCHITECTURES THROUGH WHICH UNEQUAL WORLDS BECOME VISIBLE

Friday, July 17, 2026

THE GROUND BENEATH THE MODEL: CAPITAL, MIGRATION, TECHNICAL IMAGINATION AND THE ARCHITECTURES THROUGH WHICH UNEQUAL WORLDS BECOME VISIBLE

David Harvey begins from a decisive spatial proposition: capital does not merely occupy geography but continually reconstructs it, converting streets, housing, infrastructures and landscapes into temporary solutions for contradictions that cannot be permanently resolved. Space therefore ceases to be passive extension and becomes an active instrument through which wealth, mobility and dispossession are organized. Robin Alexander’s attention to dialogic education introduces another scale of construction, where authority is reproduced or interrupted through the architecture of speech.

Tatiana Bilbao’s buildings similarly question whether architecture can remain materially direct while resisting the social abstraction of standardized development. Sarah Charlesworth’s rearranged images disclose how visual culture manufactures evidence, while Jeremy Deller relocates historical conflict into collective performances, conversations and civic rituals. Fonna Forman carries spatial ethics toward questions of borders and public responsibility; DJ Haram transforms rhythm into an insurgent geography of diasporic sound. Julia Kristeva’s stranger unsettles the fantasy of a coherent subject just as VNS Matrix’s cyberfeminism infects the supposedly neutral languages of computation. Aihwa Ong follows citizenship as a flexible and selectively distributed condition, whereas Marshall Sahlins contests the reduction of human exchange to rational accumulation. Tiziana Terranova shows how networks absorb cultural participation as labour, making apparent freedom productive for systems whose ownership remains concentrated. Lebbeus Woods responds by imagining architecture after catastrophe, not as restoration of equilibrium but as a scaffold for inhabiting conflict. Jean-Luc Marion’s saturated phenomenon names what exceeds conceptual capture, while Felicity D. Scott traces architecture’s entanglement with media, institutions and geopolitical power. Freya Mathews extends philosophical agency beyond the human, suggesting that ecological relation begins when the world is approached as communicative presence rather than inert resource. Charles Chaplin had already understood the comic and brutal intimacy between body and machine: industrial modernity appears in his cinema as an apparatus whose rhythms enter gesture, appetite and nervous life. Haile Gerima reverses the imperial camera, making historical memory a site of struggle rather than inherited representation. Marianne Brandt’s metal objects condense modern design’s promise of rational universality, while Rudolf Schwarzkogler’s documented actions expose the violence hidden beneath the purified surface. Turiya Adkins reclaims weightlessness, flight and athletic movement as historical and ancestral figures; Bemamy Beriziky carries another political and artistic trajectory from Madagascar into a constellation that cannot be contained by metropolitan canons. Minerva Cuevas intervenes in corporate signs, prices and systems of distribution, revealing the symbolic surface of economic infrastructures. Luciano Floridi’s informational environments intensify this question: when reality becomes increasingly organized through data, the politics of access, deletion and classification become environmental conditions. MTAA’s networked humour turns technological failure and contractual logic into artistic matter. Richard Laté Lawson-Body’s calligraphic surfaces return inscription to gesture, layering and silence. Nandipha Mntambo transforms cowhide into unstable presences where animal material, gender and corporeal memory remain inseparable. Dylan Phillips treats the moving body as an architecture of balance, risk and reciprocal support. Raqib Shaw’s opulent surfaces make ornament convulse into violence, while Recetas Urbanas constructs through occupation, reuse and collective negotiation rather than waiting for institutional permission. Haseeb Ahmed’s experiments with wind give material form to forces ordinarily known only through their effects. George Brecht’s event scores locate art at the threshold between instruction and contingency. Berlinde De Bruyckere’s wounded forms and Charles Garnier’s monumental theatrical architecture occupy opposed regimes of embodiment, yet both organize spectatorship through envelopes, exposure and carefully staged excess. Marta Ignerska fragments visual narrative into graphic fields of motion. Isaac Levitan makes landscape bear emotional and historical weather; Berthe Morisot converts domestic and social proximity into unstable atmospheres of light. Kālidāsa’s poetry joins season, desire and cosmological order without separating the human figure from climate. Miriam Schapiro’s patterned surfaces recover decorative and domestic forms from their exclusion by modernist hierarchy. Joaquín Torres Vérez represents architecture’s contemporary conversion into image and luxury apparatus, whereas Nabil Ahmed tracks environmental violence across territories where legal evidence must be extracted from dispersed material traces. Constantin Brâncuși’s reductions are not withdrawals from matter but attempts to release its recurrent energies. DAAR reopens the architecture of displacement by treating camps, abandoned sites and colonial structures as spaces of political knowledge. Hélène Frichot asks how feminist philosophy might become an architectural practice rather than a theoretical supplement. Yasco Horsman reads graphic narrative through framing, trauma and seriality. Léopold Lambert makes architecture answerable for the violence performed through walls, partitions, streets and territorial law. Saadia Mirza listens to landscapes through remote sensing, simulation and environmental media, making technical observation perceptible as a historically situated practice. Rajni Perera’s hybrid figures inhabit futures assembled from migration, armour, mythology and speculative survival. José Luis Sampedro insisted that economic systems remain human constructions rather than autonomous natural laws. Kjetil Trædal Thorsen’s architecture negotiates monumental landscape, public circulation and institutional identity. Walter Pichler compressed inhabitation into prostheses, capsules and media environments where architecture touched the nervous system. Arnolfo di Cambio gave medieval civic and religious power material presence through sculpture and building. Ernst Ludwig Kirchner recorded metropolitan speed as bodily distortion. Joaquín Torres-García inverted the map of South America, not as graphic provocation alone but as a reorientation of cultural gravity. Avicenna’s medicine and metaphysics joined observation, causality and philosophical speculation within a knowledge system that later European histories too often treated merely as transmission. José Sabogal mobilized Indigenous and Andean figures within the contradictions of Peruvian nation-building. Ariadna Guiteras converts vulnerability, bodily contact and spatial dependence into sculptural situations. Juraj Florek’s ceramics carry landscape and atmosphere into fired matter. The Propeller Group examines propaganda, branding and collective identity through the same polished languages employed by states and corporations. Avital Ronell follows technological and narcotic dependencies into the unstable foundations of subjectivity. Abdus Salam’s theoretical physics emerged alongside a sustained demand that scientific capacity not remain monopolized by wealthy nations. Gregor Mendel’s peas became an epistemic machine through repetition and counting; Dmitri Mendeleyev’s periodic table arranged chemical matter so that absence itself became predictive. Suzana Herculano-Houzel revises assumptions about brains through comparative quantification, demonstrating that even the most intimate organ is understood through methods of partition and scale. Utsa Patnaik returns abstraction to hunger, agricultural labour and colonial extraction. Grace Blakeley examines financialization as a political architecture rather than an accidental distortion of otherwise neutral markets. Wang Li’s linguistics situates language inside historical transformation; Lu Jiuyuan locates knowledge in the inseparability of mind and world. Al-Farabi imagines philosophy, music and political order as coordinated forms of composition. Saichō establishes an institutional and spiritual terrain in which study becomes a long ethical discipline. Jhumpa Lahiri inhabits the distance between languages until estrangement becomes a productive literary form. Chandra Talpade Mohanty reveals how apparently universal categories can reproduce colonial relations by erasing differences in labour, history and power. Natsai Audrey Chieza treats microorganisms as collaborators in fabrication, moving design from extraction toward negotiated biological production. Janette Sadik-Khan demonstrates that urban space can be altered through tactical reallocation before monumental reconstruction, allowing the street to become an experimental civic surface. Boris Strugatsky uses speculative fiction to test bureaucratic reason, scientific desire and moral compromise. Bharti Kher’s bindis migrate from bodily ornament to proliferating conceptual skin. Norma Alarcón’s feminist translation crosses language, race and geopolitical position without dissolving their tensions. Fruit Chan reads the city through marginal bodies and unstable urban economies. Tale of Tales turns the digital game away from competition and toward atmospheric inhabitation. Zackary Drucker reconstructs trans histories through performance, photography and collaborative memory. Lily Roberts brings material intimacy and social ritual into contemporary jewellery. Jean-Baptiste Fressoz shows that industrial societies did not innocently discover ecological consequences after the fact; they repeatedly chose risk while producing narratives of technological inevitability. Ronald Neame’s cinema carries theatrical, literary and historical structures into popular visual form. J. Nicholas Entrikin studies place as the point where objective location and subjective attachment become mutually constitutive. Ayşe Erkmen alters circulation through slight spatial interventions, making architecture perceptible by displacing its habitual use. John Ashbery’s syntax behaves like an urban field in which meanings appear, diverge and return without settling into a single viewpoint. Aleksandar Hemon writes exile through fractured memory and linguistic reinvention. Emily Bernard locates the essay within the charged space where personal experience meets racial history. Laila Lalami reconstructs migration and colonial narration through voices denied authority by official records. Thomas Merton’s contemplative writing turns withdrawal into criticism of technological violence and political conformity. Jan Schoonhoven’s repetitive reliefs make minor variation visible inside apparent uniformity. Patrick Tam’s cinema follows intimacy across Hong Kong’s accelerated transformations. Jaume Cabré composes memory as a dense network of guilt, language and historical inheritance. Peter Weiss’s documentary theatre refuses to separate aesthetic form from political testimony. Vector Architects builds with climate, ruin and material restraint rather than treating the site as an empty platform. Leopoldo Nóvoa’s scorched and sedimented surfaces turn abstraction into matter carrying displacement and memory. Jenny E. Sabin translates biological behaviour and computational pattern into responsive architectural systems. Torolab treats food, borders, mobility and urban survival as matters for collective design research. Eden Robinson’s fiction brings Haisla worlds, colonial violence and contemporary precarity into contact without surrendering cultural specificity. Amparo Dávila makes domestic interiors mutate into zones of dread, where the familiar reveals structures of confinement that realism alone cannot name. Across these positions, the city appears neither as a stable object nor as a neutral container, but as an unequal arrangement of capacities: the capacity to remain, to move, to speak, to calculate, to remember and to make one’s suffering admissible as evidence. The task is not to reconcile these forces into an elegant totality. It is to build forms through which their differences can circulate without becoming interchangeable, and through which the material consequences of abstraction can be returned to bodies, territories and histories. A legible field must therefore operate like a critical city: porous enough to receive unfamiliar trajectories, structured enough to preserve their provenance, and restless enough to reveal that every map, interface, institution and aesthetic form is already an argument about who may inhabit the world.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

David Harvey — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Harvey

Project Index
https://antolloveras.blogspot.com/p/socioplastics-project-index.html

Anto Lloveras
Socioplastics — LAPIEZA-LAB

WITH

David Harvey, Robin Alexander, Tatiana Bilbao, Sarah Charlesworth, Jeremy Deller, Fonna Forman, DJ Haram, Julia Kristeva, VNS Matrix, Aihwa Ong, Marshall Sahlins, Tiziana Terranova, Lebbeus Woods, Jean-Luc Marion, Felicity D. Scott, Freya Mathews, Charles Chaplin, Haile Gerima, Marianne Brandt, Rudolf Schwarzkogler, Turiya Adkins, Bemamy Beriziky, Minerva Cuevas, Luciano Floridi, MTAA, Richard Laté Lawson-Body, Nandipha Mntambo, Dylan Phillips, Raqib Shaw, Recetas Urbanas, Haseeb Ahmed, George Brecht, Berlinde De Bruyckere, Charles Garnier, Marta Ignerska, Isaac Levitan, Berthe Morisot, Kālidāsa, Miriam Schapiro, Joaquín Torres Vérez, Nabil Ahmed, Constantin Brâncuși, DAAR, Hélène Frichot, Yasco Horsman, Léopold Lambert, Saadia Mirza, Rajni Perera, José Luis Sampedro, Kjetil Trædal Thorsen, Walter Pichler, Arnolfo di Cambio, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Joaquín Torres-García, Avicenna, José Sabogal, Ariadna Guiteras, Juraj Florek, The Propeller Group, Avital Ronell, Abdus Salam, Gregor Mendel, Dmitri Mendeleyev, Suzana Herculano-Houzel, Utsa Patnaik, Grace Blakeley, Wang Li, Lu Jiuyuan, Al-Farabi, Saichō, Jhumpa Lahiri, Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Natsai Audrey Chieza, Janette Sadik-Khan, Boris Strugatsky, Bharti Kher, Norma Alarcón, Fruit Chan, Tale of Tales, Zackary Drucker, Lily Roberts, Jean-Baptiste Fressoz, Ronald Neame, J. Nicholas Entrikin, Ayşe Erkmen, John Ashbery, Aleksandar Hemon, Emily Bernard, Laila Lalami, Thomas Merton, Jan Schoonhoven, Patrick Tam, Jaume Cabré, Peter Weiss, Vector Architects, Leopoldo Nóvoa, Jenny E. Sabin, Torolab, Eden Robinson, Amparo Dávila.