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.
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.
