Me acuerdo de buscar Pinups de los años sesenta en los P2P, antes de la nube, para llenarlas de fuegos. Me acuerdo de la instalación de video con 16 monitores en paralelo, con mis doscientos primeroscopos. Solo-show. Me acuerdo del sofá arruga diseñado para Arco, y de los bidones para las revistas. Me acuerdo de salir en bici en la tarde por Chueca y llegar hasta el frescor del Retiro. Me acuerdo de la lámpara ducha que montó Mario, enganchada al carrito colador. Me acuerdo de las tardes dibujando con Christian, arrodillados sobre el mueble de los cuatro cubos y la alfombra Wilma. Me acuerdo de encolar las primeras 100 cajas que contendrían mis mil libros, y de leer cada noche en el mítico sofá sueco, en Blasco. Me acuerdo de la esbeltez de los pilares del edificio Trole.
FLAKES —or COPOS in Spanish— is not merely a video series but a keystone within the broader socioplastic methodology, crystallizing multiple layers of well-being, memory, reality, and documentary form into a continuous practice of urban inscription. Rooted in the principle that the city is a living conservatory, FLAKES treats everyday gestures—walking, waiting, listening, drifting—not as marginal events but as central sculptural acts within a distributed aesthetic field. Each numbered entry, often tied to a location (Mexico City, Madrid, Marseille, London), operates simultaneously as cinematic fragment and ethnographic trace, transforming urban flux into a malleable medium for reflection, resistance, and poetic observation. The significance of FLAKES lies in its temporal accumulation: over 600 entries since 2008 form not a documentary archive in the conventional sense, but a situational cosmology, where each episode acts as a living pixel in the construction of urban memory. This methodology does not seek monumental representation, but rather a micro-political attention to the ephemeral, where street food (COPOS 436), public registration (COPOS 439), or wedding aesthetics (COPOS 443) become scenes of social plasticity. The act of filming, much like editing or walking, becomes a form of ritual materiality—a way of producing care and significance through repetition and context. Through this, FLAKES enacts Lefebvre’s Right to the City, turning urban rights into lived, documented experiences. Its layers—filmic, poetic, political—reveal the city not as fixed infrastructure, but as cinematic matter, edited through movement, memory, and relation. As a keystone, FLAKES holds together the theoretical and the tactile dimensions of socioplastics, sustaining an ecology where artistic attention itself becomes a form of life-making.
MiniRoc emerges as a direct evolution of the sonic needs of COPOS, the expansive video-performance series initiated by Anto Lloveras and developed under TOMOTO Films, with the creative complicity of Hectruso (Héctor Crehuet) and the live sound of El Intruso. Born from the necessity to capture real sound in uncontrolled urban environments, MiniRoc was designed as a portable amplification-recording system—a hybrid machine that blends speaker, microphone, and body into a single mobile interface. During the early COPOS episodes—from Madrid to London, Marseille to Mexico City (2010–2013)—the need for a more integrated, embodied sound tool became urgent, especially when performing in chaotic, noisy streets or delicate acoustic zones where the voice needed presence without overpowering the space. MiniRoc answered this by turning the performer into a moving node of sonic activation, allowing speech, music, and ambient noise to coexist, collide, and feedback in live time. More than a technical tool, MiniRoc became an aesthetic pivot between the intimate gesture of COPOS and the full-bodied dérive of LACALLE, where it evolved from a functional solution to a poetic prosthesis—an active agent of listening, disruption, and amplification. Built collaboratively by Hectruso through trial, error, and field experimentation, its design is both minimal and raw, adapting to different geographies and performative intensities. MiniRoc is not simply carried—it is inhabited, becoming an extension of the artist’s voice and a tactical medium to inscribe sound into the street. From “COPOS 436 GORDITAS AHOGADAS” to “COPOS 443 ESTILO NUPCIAL”, MiniRoc quietly transformed videoperformance into a shared acoustic space, where the city listens back.https://www.medialab-matadero.es/personal/hectruso-y-tomoto
THE SITUATION IN AMSTERDAM IS EXTENDING THE POSITIONAL ESSAYS
As part of the dutch flamenco biennale im invited to generate a memory essay of a new piece, in progress. We work in Amsterdam, with Mateo Feijoo as active relational programmer We make a piece for a flamenco dancer. Flamenco is the commodity that is used and deconstructed from its usual scenarios. We work on a minimal set, with conversation as main tool for the evolution of an action, with the proximity with the audience. We live and work in he hotel ARENA near the zoo. The dancer brings some small wooden boxes to use as portable stages. Very independent. The producers speak on their cell phones all day to get some technical support and a room for the intimate recordings. I walk the city as usual, taking the city as readymade, and subtract the installation from the real, to be presented at the show as real memory scenario. We work some days, and the piece is done. We make a rehearsal with no audience, very minimal and immediately after the same action with a hundred guests. The compression is huge. The sequence is recorded and edited during the show so at the end of the show the piece is finished. You saw it real and you saw again, the piece with you in it.
Part of the extensive COPOS (Flakes) project—a long-term artistic investigation comprising over 500 works created between 2008 and 2019—COPOS Bogotá represents one of the series’ most radical entries: a one-hour, durational film shot in the historically conflicted district of Los Mártires, Bogotá. Working within the project’s conceptual frame of "hyperplastic compression"—a method that decomposes and recomposes urban fragments into cinematic matter (Lloveras, 2018–2025)—this film constructs a dense visual field where informal labour, transport infrastructures, and choreographed interventions collide. The neighbourhood is not simply a backdrop but a sentient urban entity, where spectral stillness and kinetic overload coexist: vendors wrapped in textiles, buses maneuvering through narrow lanes, surveillant gazes, and the residual architecture of collapse all participate in the image. Crucially, the shoot was marked by a real-time police threat: following a Sunday dawn action with a dancer, the filmmaker was pursued on foot by armed officers into adjacent barrios, embedding lived risk directly into the film’s epistemology (ibid.). Rather than abstracting the violence, the film embraces it through an aesthetic of embeddedness—offering no narration, no closure, only sustained exposure. Echoing Harney and Moten’s (2013) notion of the undercommons, COPOS Bogotá resists extractive seeing by foregrounding opacity, proximity, and discontinuity. In this way, the film becomes both document and defiance, enacting a visual grammar where each flake is not only a fragment of the city’s surface, but a rupture in its narrative logic, capturing Bogotá as a volatile, wounded, and irreducibly living archive.
