Situación Velázquez 100 * The Architecture of Compression and Collective Memory

The voice of this intervention is activated from within a "interstitial capsule"—a Madrid apartment on the verge of dissolution. This is not merely a site for exhibition, but a high-pressure environment where the urgency of a "funeral for space" meets the tactical necessity of socioplastic action. As curators and practitioners within the PLANCTON collective, we activate this piece now because the urban fabric is increasingly composed of these vanishing points: private, historical interiors that are about to be recycled or erased by the market. We address the friction between the weight of a pre-existing past—imprinted in the dust and the layout of a home—and the fleeting, three-hour compression of contemporary artistic desire. The necessity of this work lies in its refusal to let a space disappear in silence, instead forcing a final, fertile confrontation between its domestic memory and a deliberate, professional artistic presence. The core device of Velázquez 100 is a "three-hour situation" governed by a logic of spatial colonization and professional rigor. Ten invited artists, functioning as a "symbiotic field," operate independently yet contribute to a singular, joint action. The method is strictly non-amateur: artists bring their established trajectories into the space, utilizing it as a laboratory for the compression of intent. The operational structure is defined by a set of rigid constraints: nothing can be destroyed, and everything must eventually return to its original position. Within this timeframe, the process unfolds through the "measurement" of space, where physical bodies and digital sensors (cameras as extensions of the gaze) sequence the environment into a series of "memories." This is a functional system of post-production where the work is liberated from the object and instead occurs as a series of social and symbolic projections, documented in real-time to be later reconstructed in the collective brain of the network.

Qualitätskontrolle III * Synesthetic Collage and Relational Salting

Activating an in-situ creation process at the Antiguas Naves Cigarreras in Cádiz responds to the need for a "social sculpture" that is not merely observed, but tasted. In an era saturated with prefabricated narratives, Qualitätskontrolle III presents itself as a haute cuisine dish served warm, devoid of any prior script or score. From the vastness of the industrial warehouse, the team operates as ingredients of a living composition: large sacks of coarse salt, thick blankets, and bodies in tracksuits map the tempos of a motley city breathing between the echo of flamenco and the roar of the sea. It is an investigation into scale and the order of disorder, where the urgency lies in capturing a "final form" that is never stable; it is a vibration. The central device is a double-screen high-definition installation (3x2m) that dialogues with the live action. 

Engineering of ARCO ART FAIR MADRID

 

The spatial direction of ARCO'05, spearheaded by Anto Lloveras under the @TABLE project unit, activates a critical inquiry into the temporary city as a site of institutional friction. Operating within the 22,511 $m^2$ expanse of Madrid’s trade fair, this intervention emerges at the intersection of high-stakes art commerce and the "socioplastic" need to humanize industrial infrastructure. We activate this voice now to address the urgent necessity of reclaiming public agency within hyper-curated environments. By treating the fair not as a neutral container but as a plastic material, the project addresses the friction between the rigidity of the "white cube" and the metabolic drift of 21st-century urbanism. It is a method of situating the body within a system of global exchange, ensuring that the "right to the city" persists even within the ephemeral confines of an international art fair. 

Cosmotidiano * Mutable Habitats * LAPIEZA ART SERIES

Emerging from the Sierra Norte of Madrid in 2012, this intervention activates a critical inquiry into the shifting nature of shared domesticity and its entanglement with planetary scales. Speaking from the perspective of socioplastics, I position Cosmotidiano not as a static exhibition, but as a "mutable collective habitat"—a temporary occupation that addresses the friction between institutional space and the raw vitality of collaborative practice. Why this project now? Because in an era of increasing social isolation, the necessity of reclaiming the "everyday" through ritual and material gesture is more urgent than ever. 

Socioplastics and the Urban Palimpsest * Reclaiming Memory Against Homogenization

 

The urgency of this intervention arises from the rapid erosion of local identity within the contemporary urban landscape, specifically under the pressures of gentrification and turistization. As a curator and researcher at the UAM Madrid, my voice is activated from the friction between academic discourse and the lived reality of communities facing cultural displacement. We are witnessing a systemic flattening of the city, where memory is often treated as an obstacle to profit rather than a foundational human right. This piece is a response to that flattening—a necessary rupture in the seamless narrative of urban progress. It addresses the "socioplastic" need to reshape our environments not through top-down mandates, but through the tactile, messy, and urgent demands of collective memory. By situating this work within the framework of the Human Rights and Culture Congress, we acknowledge that the right to a city is inextricably linked to the right to preserve one’s cultural ecology against the homogenizing forces of global capital. At the core of this project lies a process-based investigation into the material residues of the neighborhood—a method of "urban gleaning" that transforms discarded narratives into active socioplastic structures. The process begins with the systematic collection of oral histories and physical artifacts from sites slated for redevelopment. These elements are not merely archived; they are reconfigured into modular, mobile installations that drift through the city. This operational logic treats the artwork as a living organism: a series of translucent panels and soundscapes that mutate based on their physical proximity to the public. Each module functions as a sensory bridge, sequencing memories of local labor and domestic life into the very streets from which they are being erased. The work behaves as a feedback loop, where the material density of the past is layered over the sterile surfaces of the present, forcing a physical encounter with what has been made invisible.

A transdisciplinary entanglement where bodies and light converge into a singular, unstable social sculpture * This net functions as a tactile bridge, visualizing the invisible threads of collective agency and sustainable coexistence.

The urgency of this intervention, titled Unstable Light, stems from the need to visualize the invisible threads of collective agency within the rural landscape of Provence. This voice is activated from a "transdisciplinary terrain" where architecture and art converge to address the fragility of social bonds in a hyper-mediated world. By situating the work in France, the project addresses the necessity of a "cultural ecology" that resists rigid structures through constant mutation. It is a response to the "distributed agency" of our time, creating a mode of attention that focuses on the symbiotic relationship between people and their environment. This piece serves as a friction point against social isolation, using light as a tactile medium to weave together diverse cultural backgrounds—from Iran to Italy and Croatia—into a single, resilient social fabric. The core device of Unstable Light is a "Light Social Sculpture," a physical net of translucent material that behaves as a metabolic filter for the human body. The process involves the collective entanglement of multiple artists who use the net to bridge the gap between individual presence and symbolic projection. Operationally, the work unfolds through the tactile manipulation of this light-sensitive mesh, which is worn, stretched, and shared among participants. This is not a symbolic gesture but a functional system of "socioplastics"—the net acts as a material logic for interaction, sequencing the movements of the artists into a unified, mutating form. The process is documented through video and photography, capturing the unstable nature of the light as it interacts with the textures of the skin and the Mediterranean landscape.

FILM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xBwJV5Rmesk

Blue Pants * A Mobile Grammar of Presence

 

In the frayed peripheries of Madrid's concrete labyrinth, where algorithmic streams collide with migratory paths, I activate Blue Pants as a vital counterpoint to the dilution of embodied experience. As an artist-curator immersed in socioplastics—the interstitial fusion of spatial logics and perceptual maneuvers—this series resurfaces amid 2026's surge of virtual encroachments, where identities fragment into pixelated shards and places dissolve into geolocated data. Why this piece now? It confronts the erosion of tactile agency in a era of relentless digital dispersal, insisting on the garment's weave as a thread against isolation. From an urban-ecological vantage, it emerges from systems of flux: border crossings, environmental precarity, social dislocations. Blue Pants addresses frictions in attention— the garment's crisp folds against wind-swept sands, the body's rigid extension amid fluid horizons—recalibrating how we navigate distributed presences, turning passive observation into active negotiation with materials, terrains, and communal drifts. At its nucleus, Blue Pants deploys the vivid azure trousers as a pivotal apparatus, orchestrating a ritualized sequence across temporal and spatial layers from 2014 to 2019. The process initiates with selection: the artist slips into the fabric's structured embrace, calibrates posture—an arm thrust outward like a horizon probe—and embeds within locales teeming with contrasts, from Cádiz's granular dunes shifting underfoot to Norway's mist-veiled fjords echoing with silence, Berlin's sterile gallery walls, Croatia's fractured urban crevices, and Negradas's arid expanses. Materially, the pants morph: worn taut against skin, draped as spectral extensions on gritty surfaces, or bundled in blue plastic carriers that crinkle with movement. Photographic captures freeze these instants—unfiltered lenses seizing the interplay of light on polyester sheen, shadows pooling in creases—while drawings distill them into watercolor bleeds merging figure with foliage. This system functions through iterative loops: site immersion, gestural inscription, archival fixation, each cycle amplifying the garment's role as a binding agent, constructing a lexicon where minimal repetition yields dense relational webs without extraneous adornments.

Red line * Soft architecture * Inflated gestures * Urban frictions

Red Line functions as a nomadic, portable infrastructure designed to test the limits of Pneumatic Friction in public space. The sculpture’s materiality is inherently contradictory: a fragile, high-visibility skin of red industrial tape housing a dense core of "Superjunk"—plastic debris scavenged from the high-stress environment of Calle Montera. By relocating the waste of the "lodazal" into a sculptural format, Lloveras performs an act of Urban Phagocytosis, where the discarded remnants of the consumerist cycle are metabolized into a vibrant, pressurized signal of presence. In the lineage of Claes Oldenburg’s soft architectures and the radical constructs of the Russian avant-garde, the Red Line operates as a Situational Fixer. It is a "breathable barrier" that occupies the void of the sidewalk, forcing the pedestrian to physically negotiate a path around the discarded mass of their own city. This is the Ethics of the Discarded: the sculpture does not represent waste; it is waste re-coded as agency. Whether carried through the city or installed in a gallery, the line serves as a chromatic anchor that visualizes the invisible threads of urban movement and the heavy weight of our collective metabolic leftovers.

There are moments when the city’s surfaces feel too smooth, too compliant—when the built environment, engineered for efficiency and flow, begins to erase our physical presence within it. Red Line is activated from this condition, from a sense that something essential has been lost in the frictionless choreography of modern urban life. Positioned from within a networked, mobile curatorial practice that treats the street not just as backdrop but as volatile site, this project emerges as a refusal to glide. It proposes an intervention that slows us down, tangles us up, asks something of our bodies. This work was necessary now because the city has become an interface—tapped, swiped, and spectated more than inhabited. By reintroducing a stubborn material presence into those soft zones between architecture and movement, Red Line calls for a recalibration of our sensory and spatial attention. It interrupts the seamless scroll of place, insisting instead on touch, scale, and negotiation. At its core, Red Line is a sculptural system built around a single gesture: the insertion of a long, pressurized red form—a flexible cylinder of air, pigment, and plastic—into various urban and domestic architectures. This form behaves like a soft architectural wedge, a tool that bends the existing logic of space without destroying it. In the 2011 iterations Exotic Plants and Korv, the object was wedged into windows, dragged across floors, held aloft by participants or cut across reflective glass. The process is deliberately analog: inflate, position, suspend, adjust. 

Each placement is both a spatial interruption and a form of measurement—testing the limits of openings, walls, and bodies. The method is iterative, parasitic, and adaptive. There is no ideal placement; instead, the red line responds to each site with improvised tension. It expands until the room resists, or the participants can no longer hold it. It is not merely installed—it occupies. This sculptural logic connects with a broader curatorial approach that treats objects not as static displays but as active, relational tools. In this, Red Line finds resonance with Jane Bennett’s notion of vibrant matter, where the object itself exerts force and participates in the choreography of the encounter. The red cylinder is not symbolic—it acts. It shifts the agency of the installation from the artist to the materials, the site, and the bodies required to stabilize or adapt it. Nicolas Bourriaud’s Relational Aesthetics offers another entry point, though Red Line departs from its convivial mode and veers toward precarious collaboration: participants are not invited to engage but compelled to hold, balance, and support. One might also trace this logic through Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizomatic thought—the red form behaves not as a singular expression but as a mobile connector, tracing new links between window and floor, human and surface. These references scaffold the work lightly, emphasizing a curatorial method grounded in distributed agency and shared construction rather than centralized authorship.

The Fishbowl * Architecture of the Media Bubble * Disney Channel (2000–2005)

Revisiting a project from 2003 in the year 2026 is not an exercise in nostalgia, but a necessary excavation of the origins of our current "media drift." I activate this piece now from a place of deep urban and technological friction—an era where the boundaries between the physical room and the digital broadcast have entirely dissolved. The "Disney Channel TV Set" project emerged during a pivotal moment when television began to consume its own temporal logic, demanding spaces that could keep pace with a frantic, non-stop programming cycle. It addresses the urgency of creating a stable architectural response to an inherently unstable medium. By looking back at this 15x15 meter void, we observe the birth of the "narrative container," a system designed to house the hyper-speed attention of a nascent digital generation. It is a social and conceptual artifact that marks the transition from static scenery to inhabitable, liquid environments. The core operational logic of this project rests on the concept of "The Fishbowl" (La Pecera). The device is a 15x15 meter inhabitable void where the traditional architectural hierarchy of four walls and a floor is dismantled. Instead, the team at TABLE engineered a continuous skin of interlocking folds and planes that behave as a singular, fluid surface. This material system allows for total 360º navigation, enabling cameras to move through the space without encountering the "backstage" or a dead end. The structure behaves as a functional loop: some elements remain in a state of relative quietude while others are in literal motion, entrelaced to configure a liquid geometry. The sequencing of the set—moving from oversized to miniaturized objects—destroys recognizable scale, turning the physical room into an abstract machine for play. It is a system of "appropriable structures" designed not just for viewing, but for the active choreography of moving, speaking, and interacting within a media-saturated vacuum.

Unstable Scenography * Art Meets Fashion * MADRID

Set against the accelerated texture of Madrid in 2011, Art Meets Fashion emerges as a pivotal socioplastic intervention where garments, bodies, and precarious props converge into an unstable but lucid syntax of wearable critique; framed within LAPIEZA’s Unstable Installation Series, this project dismantles the divide between fashion and architecture, treating the human body as a mobile site for aesthetic experimentation, where ephemeral materials—plastic, industrial fragments, symbolic objects—become structural agents in a performative act of urban friction; the clips, activated through looped video and situated gestures, enact a method of site-responsive draping, in which movement choreographs the form and every garment behaves less as a finished product than as an architectural probe reacting to the ambient conditions of the city; this visual language, rooted in media drift, mutates across platforms—from the tactile immediacy of physical sets to the cinematic temporality of YouTube and socioplastic archives—allowing the work to transcend its original context and become a nomadic system for decoding identity and consumption through unstable aesthetics; drawing on Judith Butler’s notion of performativity, the project positions the clothed body as a continuous act of construction, while echoing Foucault’s heterotopias by staging interventions in spaces that resist urban normativity; the garments are not adornments but responsive surfaces, co-constituted with their surroundings through a distributed agency à la Bruno Latour, where props, fabric, and environment collectively author the image; Art Meets Fashion thus functions as a wearable heterotopia, a moving critique that repurposes fashion as method, asking what architectures of identity can emerge when the body becomes a sensorial interface in the unstable choreography of the contemporary city.

EXTENDED

https://antolloveras.blogspot.com/2026/01/art-meets-fashion-body-as-mobile-surface.html

SUPREMATISM * TRAFALGAR CÁDIZ

In the Cádiz dunes, Hidden Forces unfolds as a site-specific subtraction, a formal act of quiet resistance against the saturated textures of human presence, where coastal bunkers tagged with chaotic graffiti are overwritten with black geometric blocks, not as decoration but as void-structures—rigorous interruptions that absorb both light and noise; the project enacts a minimalist censorship, replacing the ego-driven gesture of tagging with a silent Suprematist logic, echoing Malevich’s pursuit of pure feeling but re-situated into a non-idealized, eroding terrain, where sand, wind and salt air are collaborators rather than context; the rectangles function as conceptual filters, reducing visual overload while opening space for material dialogue with the Atlantic's shifting ecology; the ruins—once inert witnesses of failed urbanism—become activated by this erasure, their architectural weight now re-inscribed with processual fragility, invoking Smithson’s entropic thinking and Jane Bennett’s distributed agency, where environmental systems reclaim and deform human marks; as the black pigment fades, is buried, or fractured, the work mutates into media, captured in a looped video that drifts across platforms as archival residue, allowing the piece to reappear elsewhere as a spectral trace; Hidden Forces thus establishes a template for ephemeral interventions that reframe the artist’s role—not as a builder of monuments but as a strategist of disappearance, someone who makes space for un-making in environments saturated with visual and historical noise; this is not preservation but revelatory concealment, a refusal to add more clutter, choosing instead to vanish with intent, leaving only sharpened attention in place of form (Lloveras 2026).

NARRATIVE

https://antolloveras.blogspot.com/2026/01/hidden-forces-geometry-of-vanishing.html

Environmental Psychology as Cultural Interface * https://psicologiaambientalhoy.blogspot.com

 

Writing from the intersection of environmental psychology and urban mediation, this text situates itself within the friction of the contemporary European city—specifically the academic-artistic corridor between Madrid and Barcelona. We activate this inquiry now because the "urban" is no longer just a physical container but a psychological and digital overlay that requires constant re-negotiation. The project emerges from a necessity to bridge the gap between scientific rigor and public visibility, addressing a mode of attention that is increasingly fragmented by digital noise. By utilizing the Urbanas initiative as a case study, we observe how ecological consciousness is not a passive state but a curated friction. It addresses the system of scientific dissemination by moving it out of the laboratory and into the relational sphere of the street, the screen, and the social network, demanding a more rhythmic, participatory form of public life.

https://psicologiaambientalhoy.blogspot.com/

Cosmotidiano * Clips

Captured in the raw, performative atmosphere of the CCH Sierra Norte in 2012, these clips document the inaugural activation of Cosmotidiano. Far from a static recording, this video series functions as a socioplastic archive, where the "blitz" of direct action meets the sensory density of the installation. In these fragments, the collaborative friction of Eduardo Cajal, Hectruso, Tomoto, and Regina Fiz becomes visible: the manipulation of straw, the ritual of the citrus, and the spatial displacement of the body. Each clip is a positional essay in motion—a document of "Life in Transit" where the camera becomes an extension of the body-machine, inhaling the ephemeral architecture of the trench and the soft tectonics of the collective habitat. This is the "metamovie" in its most primal state: unstable, rhythmic, and deeply rooted in the relational reality of LAPIEZA Art Series #49. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KjQEM3_IGT8 ACTION 01: THE INAUGURAL PULSE http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lkXBdr1dTGs ACTION 04: SOFT TECTONICS & SENSORY DRIFT http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XHJ4npWxcfk ACTION 02: THE COLLECTIVE INTERFACE

LAPIEZA ART SERIES #49*2012 SOCIOPLASTICS 

BY ANTO LLOVERAS 

https://antolloveras.blogspot.com

Cosmotidiano * Trinchera

Rooted in the rural matrix of Sierra Norte yet unfolding through planetary drift, Cosmotidiano operates as a mutable habitat, a living architecture where the intimacy of shared domesticity collides with the spatial grammar of socioplastics to produce a mode of existence in flux; developed in 2012 at the Centro Comarcal de Humanidades as part of LAPIEZA Art Series #49, this project dissolves the boundaries between institution and impulse, configuring a collective metabolic system through ephemeral materials—straw bales, citrus peels, plastic mesh, and networked video—that behave less as sculptural matter than as responsive agents in a soft choreography of relation; the installation rejects the static logic of the exhibition in favor of ritualized activation, with each element—Regina Fiz’s performance, Tomoto’s video drifts, Eduardo Cajal’s tactile interventions—contributing to a shifting constellation where art becomes a lived, situated ecology; the straw units, termed “horizontal tectonics,” become vectors for shared rest and friction, while Paula Lloveras’ mandarin nets infuse the space with olfactory traces that fold memory into architecture; the work unfolds as a processual heterotopia, aligning with Foucault’s spatial theory and echoing Bourriaud’s micro-utopias, but grounded in Jane Bennett’s vibrant materialism, where agency is distributed among ten artists and multiple mediums, resisting authorial fixity; as the project mutates into a digital metamovie, its physical specificity dissolves into media drift, reappearing as a nomadic essay in contexts far beyond La Cabrera, suggesting a method for decoding collective life through soft gestures and everyday residues; rather than monumental design, Cosmotidiano proposes a gentle architecture that breathes through clip, fruit, and straw, prompting future reactivations where the body, again and again, becomes a tool for building joy.

Lloveras, A. (2012) ‘Cosmotidiano: Mutable Habitats’, Socioplastics Blog. https://antolloveras.blogspot.com/2026/01/cosmotidiano-mutable-habitats.html

Luminous Connectors * Distributed Agency in Exquisite Mechanics

 

Writing from the vantage point of the post-industrial street, I position this voice within the friction of the "smart city" that has forgotten the weight of its own hardware. Exquisite Mechanics is activated now as a necessary response to the increasing invisibility of urban infrastructure. It emerges from a place where the conceptual meets the ecological—specifically, an ecology of objects. This work is urgent because it addresses the modes of attention we owe to the systems that sustain our mobility. It operates within the tension of the "distributed," where the curatorial act is not a static display but a method of tracking movement. By placing these luminous, mechanical-biological surrogates into the urban grid, the project creates a site of friction against the seamless digital drift, demanding that we look at the joints and seams of our lived environment. The core device of this series is an operational logic of "modular tethering." Using pressurized, pigmented membranes—soft architectural probes—the process involves wedging these vibrant volumes into the structural gaps of the city. The material logic is one of inflation and tension; these are not merely sculptures but functional systems that test the load-bearing capacity of a space. The method follows a strict sequence: identification of a spatial void, the manual introduction of the pneumatic body, and the subsequent documentation of its occupancy. Medium and structure are inseparable here; the red "korv" (sausage-like form) behaves as a soft lever, its behavior unfolding as it adapts to the rigid geometry of stone and glass. It is a choreography of pressure that reveals the hidden dimensions of the urban container through a direct, material deployment.

THEWOODWAY * The Choreography of Making

 

Revisiting THEWOODWAY an an essential excavation of the "processual turn" in architectural education. I activate this work now from a place of deep pedagogical friction—an era where the digital twin often precedes the physical reality, risking the loss of material intelligence. Set against the stark, snowy landscape of Trondheim, Norway, this project emerged as a radical counter-system to the detached, desk-bound design studio. Its necessity lies in its embrace of the one-to-one scale as a site of social and physical negotiation. By involving eighty first-year students in the collective assembly of a massive wooden superstructure, the work addresses a critical mode of attention: the shift from singular authorship to the distributed agency of a community in flux. It is an urgent investigation into how space is not merely designed, but lived into existence through shared labor and the "pedagogy of sweat." The core operational logic of THEWOODWAY is the deployment of a 1:1 wooden superstructure that functions as an inhabitable laboratory. This was not a symbolic exercise; it was a functional system of eighteen distinct spatial interventions woven into a singular structural framework. The material logic was dictated by the structural properties of timber—cutting, joining, and bracing—under the guidance of Professor Fredrik Lund and a team of transdisciplinary professionals. The process unfolded as a sequence of iterative building phases, where the students’ conceptual drawings were immediately tested by the weight and resistance of the wood. The work behaves as a continuous loop of feedback: a gesture made in the morning by one group would necessitate a structural negotiation by another in the afternoon. This choreography of making prioritized the tactile and the sonic, transforming the construction site into an experimental soundscape of saws, voices, and material tension.