Weighing only 12 kilos and standing 250 cm tall, it’s a portable piece that defies conventional sculpture concepts. It explores themes of identity and transformation, highlighting the relationship between the human body and the surrounding space.
Weighing only 12 kilos and standing 250 cm tall, it’s a portable piece that defies conventional sculpture concepts. It explores themes of identity and transformation, highlighting the relationship between the human body and the surrounding space.
Democracy is not merely a constitutional architecture but a fragile choreography of bodies, voices, exclusions, and acts of collective imagination. This proposed work approaches the democratic condition as a performative field in which citizenship is continually rehearsed, contested, and reconfigured. Through theatre, movement, sound, and participatory dramaturgy, the project examines how individuals become political subjects: by speaking, listening, refusing, assembling, mourning, voting, migrating, and remembering. Its central proposition is that democracy in the United States can be understood not only through institutions, but through the civic gestures that sustain or corrode them. Drawing on town halls, protest chants, courtroom testimony, electoral rituals, and domestic conversations, the piece transforms familiar democratic practices into heightened theatrical encounters. A specific case study emerges from the tension between constitutional promise and lived disenfranchisement: the American polling place as both sacred civic threshold and site of historical obstruction. By juxtaposing archival fragments with contemporary embodied testimony, the work reveals how access to democratic participation remains unevenly distributed across race, class, language, and geography. From a Madrid-based perspective, the project further refracts American democracy through transatlantic memory, asking how its crises resonate beyond national borders. Ultimately, the work proposes performance as a civic laboratory: a space where spectators do not simply observe democracy, but temporarily inhabit its demands, contradictions, and unfinished possibilities.
ARTNATIONS, conceived by Anto Lloveras between 2016 and 2018, functions as a conceptual extension of LAPIEZA, his long-running Relational Art Series active since 2009, and operates as a mobile, site-specific exhibition cycle grounded in the principles of socioplastics—a methodology that embraces precarity, hybridity, and collective authorship through social, urban, and material interventions; framed as an "extended series" within LAPIEZA, ARTNATIONS imagines art as a borderless nation, a symbolic space where collaborative voices replace geopolitical boundaries and artworks become ritual objects—bags, food, fabrics, gestures—that critique systems of consumption, identity, and exchange; this speculative "nation" unfolds through around 10 shows or actions, including approximately 100 numbered works (series 1001–1100) completed in 2018, often linked to unstable installations that inhabit public spaces, galleries, and informal markets with temporary, mobile sculptures designed to generate situational interaction and urban friction; each iteration activates a form of aesthetic migration, from Madrid and Marseille to Lagos and Mexico City, creating spaces of ephemeral citizenship and symbolic cohabitation, where the artwork is not fixed but performed, shared, and dispersed; by embedding itself in the porous zones of **daily life—color rituals, food offerings, clothing actions—**ARTNATIONS refuses monumental closure and instead proposes a distributed curatorial logic, one where the archive remains open, and the artwork lives through repetition, circulation, and collective memory, aligned with Lloveras’s vision of art as relational infrastructure and cultural repair. (Lloveras, A. 2010–2025)
After World War II, a diverse group of composers, poets, dancers, and visual artists reconceptualized the score as a flexible, open-ended medium that transcended traditional boundaries between disciplines, transforming it from a tool of musical notation into a site of experimentation in performance art, conceptualism, and intermedia; inspired by the innovations of John Cage, Earle Brown, and Morton Feldman, and catalyzed by the unique interpretive role of pianist David Tudor, artists began to craft scores using textual instructions, abstract graphics, and symbolic diagrams, displacing conventional notation in favor of systems that encouraged indeterminacy, iteration, and collaboration, thereby prioritizing process over product and experience over mastery, a shift nurtured in pedagogical settings like Black Mountain College and Cage’s New School course, and institutionalized by international movements such as Fluxus, whose affiliates—including George Brecht, Alison Knowles, and Mieko Shiomi—created scores that often blurred the line between art and life through mundane actions, participation, and parody of bureaucratic language; these practices not only subverted the norms of classical composition but also challenged modernist ideologies of authorship, medium specificity, and aesthetic autonomy, especially as artists from marginalized backgrounds—such as Benjamin Patterson and later Wadada Leo Smith—inserted racial critique and vernacular knowledge into this evolving matrix, revealing the score as a transdisciplinary, radically democratic form that continues to reshape how we conceive of notation, authorship, and collective creation in contemporary art and performance.
The genealogy of Mexican performance art must be read through its intimate relation to politics, colonial memory and cultural resistance. As Galindo Carbonell demonstrates, the performance scene in Mexico cannot be reduced to mere aesthetic experimentation but is instead a strategic arena of activism in which the body becomes both weapon and testimony (Galindo Carbonell, 2021). The historical layers that structure Mexican collective identity—Spanish colonisation and the Mexican Revolution—generate entrenched gendered stereotypes: the pelado, the pachuco, the soldadera, the Virgen of Guadalupe. These figures, often promoted by nationalist discourse, continue to shape social imaginaries. Performance artists appropriate, distort and subvert these models, exposing their violent underpinnings. Figures like Lorena Wolffer and Teresa Margolles confront the aesthetics of death and femicide, while Jesusa Rodríguez and Erika Trejo reframe the myth of La Malinche to contest patriarchal historiography. This reworking of inherited archetypes demonstrates that stereotypes are not neutral cultural residues but mechanisms of domination that demand artistic insurgency (Galindo Carbonell, 2021). The thesis situates Mexican performance within transnational genealogies—from European dada and American happenings to feminist and queer interventions—yet insists on its specificity. Mexican performance develops from disenchantment with political institutions and from the urgency of decolonial critique. The body is understood not only as medium but as a site of inscription of race, class and gender; a locus of resistance where normative scripts can be disrupted. Galindo Carbonell’s conceptual framework draws on Cultural Studies, Gender Studies and Decolonial Theory, articulating performance as a transdisciplinary act. Activist collectives such as Polvo de Gallina Negra foreground feminist critique, while postporn performers like Rocío Boliver or Felipe Osornio radicalise corporeal exposure to dismantle heteronormativity. Likewise, the muxe performer Lukas Avendaño embodies indigenous counter-genders, destabilising binary logics imported by colonial modernity. What emerges is an expanded notion of performance as counter-discourse, an embodied practice that challenges both state hegemony and patriarchal violence. The critical force of Mexican performance lies not only in its aesthetic radicalism but in its ability to reimagine social contracts, exposing violence while rehearsing alternative identities. This research thus affirms that contemporary Mexican performance is inseparable from activism: its power resides in making visible, denouncing and resignifying the very stereotypes that constrain life.
Galindo Carbonell, M. D. (2021) Estereotipos, activismo y subversión de género en el performance mexicano. Universidad de Murcia.
EL DORADO is a migratory object: a single golden emergency blanket passed from body to body, sculpted through contact, time, and shared space. Conceived in Madrid in 2013 by Anto Lloveras, this socioplastic gesture emerges at the intersection of affection, material minimalism, and performative encounter, resisting the monumentality typically associated with sculpture by embracing ephemerality and circulation as form (Lloveras, 2013). Each participant receives the same object—not a copy, but the original—which takes shape anew in relation to their posture, mood, presence, and the photograph that documents them. The object remains light (twenty grams), yet charged with the symbolic density of survival, intimacy, and collective imagination. Referencing and reversing the myth of El Dorado, here gold is not found but shared, not hidden but made visible, not extracted but offered—a temporary fold of care. The work features artists such as RafaFans, Maite Cajaraville, Monoperro, Paula Lloveras, María Enríquez, Juan Barte, Vic Snake, Giuseppe Zamora, and Hectruso, among others, each inscribed within the same sculptural loop. As part of HIPERVÍNCULOS, a broader network of relational exhibitions, EL DORADO functions not as an edition but as a living rhetorical device, where sculpture is displaced from the object into the gesture of shared proximity.
AFFECTION IS FUEL
Lloveras, A. (2013) El Dorado – Escultura Socioplástica
EL DORADO es una exploración sobre el peso del vínculo. Elegí un material ligero para abrazar directamente los cuerpos, que la escultura fuera tan ligera que no pareciera escultura sino gesto. El dorado es un concepto, una idea, con la que fantaseaban los conquistadores, aquí se invierte y se localiza en terreno conocido, en la ciudad de origen. Los veinte gramos de material se asocian a cada cuerpo de forma diferente, generando una escultura única para cada artista, que se relaciona directamente con los otros al formar parte de la serie. EL DORADO es una escultura social.
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.

Lloveras, A., 2014–2019. Blue Pants [installation/performance]. Various locations: Cádiz, Norway, Berlin, Croatia, Negradas. Available at
