The "Duna Dunaj" project, enacted during a two-part residency across Dunajská Streda and Komarno in 2015, configures a living topography of relational encounters, sculpted not through materials but through gestures, spatial tension, and shared embodiment

An artistic modality rooted in situation-making, affection, and the vernacular logic of presence, resisting object-centric creation in favour of affective, durational assemblies; by initiating a practice of "walking as method", the residency unfolds as a mobile sensorium in which architecture, sediment, and memory are interwoven—Zumthor’s spatial phenomenology informs Lloveras’s practice of collecting monochrome particles and platonic stones from local mine lakes, transmuted into minimal sculptures or unstable configurations such as Protista #5, where found matter becomes compressed episodes of time and transit, not fixed installations but rather evidence of ephemeral cognition in motion; the first stage at Dunajská Streda articulates an ontological tension between Eden (the curated interior) and Paradise (the peripheral industrial), in which performative acts—like dressing in habitual codes, handling black bags or street-found shoes—suggest a relational readymade, resisting aesthetic fetishisation while enacting social anchors, with blue bags functioning as portable, unstable sculptures that drift between utility and symbol, body and site; in contrast, the second phase in the rural zone of Isza invites a recalibration of rhythm—glimpses of silence, horses chewing, and the sticky entropy of mud become anthropological notations, grounding the project in the neo-vernacular, where gestures like sharing Pálinka or holding micro-vernissages become archives of cohabitation, collapsing hierarchies between ritual and conversation, canon and instinct; the presence of Gilah Hirsch, whose dialogue links the residency to the 1960s avant-garde and the Eameses, inscribes a lineage of situational fixers, a term that echoes throughout Lloveras’s methodology, where a dead bird is no longer discard but icon, a silent witness in a narrative that foregrounds impermanence and radical attention; the final fire and exhibition at Galéria Limes do not resolve but rather dissipate the process into shared trace, proposing that the work's value lies not in preservation but in attuned disappearance, in what Lloveras calls "using the eye and the ear as a spoon to collect the cream of the days", harvesting not product but position, not spectacle but embodied duration, making Duna Dunaj less an event and more an epistemic terrain where Wittgenstein’s fly and jar metaphor becomes a navigational ethic for art in a liquid present. *

Lloveras, A. (2015) Duna Dunaj Slovakia September 2015. [Online] Available at: https://antolloveras.blogspot.com/2015/09/duna-dunaj-slovakia-september-2015.html

The Duna Dunaj Double Symposium * Socioplastics * Rituals and the Vernacular Readymade

 

The "Duna Dunaj" residency of September 2015 serves as a seminal case study in what Anto Lloveras terms "socioplastics"—a relational practice where the artist’s primary medium is the orchestration of situations, memory, and affection. Operating across a dual-stage geography from Dunajská Streda to the Danube banks in Komarno, Lloveras eschews the traditional studio confines to engage in a "durational situation." By documenting a cohort of international artists including Gilah Hirsch, Yuri Dolan, and Afarin Sajedi, Lloveras transforms the residency into a living archive. The methodology is inherently peripatetic; through daily walks—informed by the architectural phenomenology of Peter Zumthor—the artist collects "monochrome particles" and "platonic stones" from mine lakes. These tactile fragments are subsequently recontextualized as "junk monochromes" or "unstable installations," such as Protista #5, asserting that art is not merely an object produced but a "compressed synthesis of transit" and a "ritual of being." The first stage in Dunajská Streda establishes a dialogue between the "Eden" of the residence and the "Paradise" of the industrial periphery. Here, the artist acts as an "invisible" catalyst, utilizing performative readymades like a substracted black bag and shoes to challenge the origins of the aesthetic object. The use of "blue bags" as "unstable social usable sculptures" becomes a recurring motif, a "translatorial" device that bridges the gap between the artist’s hand and the bodies of other residents. This stage is characterized by a "basic identity sculpture," where Lloveras’s own attire—black pants, green hat—merges with the environment. The focus is on the "city particles," where the numbered blocks of the town and the sensory odors of the street are synthesized into a cognitive text. This process reflects a post-painterly evolution, where the "emotional junk" of memory is no longer smashed onto a canvas but is instead "fixed" through video, sound, and the rhythmic activation of the brain through walking.