The 2019 Art Symposium in Correns serves as a profound locus for investigating the intersection of "socioplastics" and the phenomenology of the Provençal landscape. Anto Lloveras, operating within a transdisciplinary framework that bridges architecture and epistemology, utilizes the village of Correns not merely as a backdrop, but as a primary reactant in a complex aesthetic equation. By embedding the "international art family" within the domestic and civic fabric of the town—specifically the Castle of Correns and local residences—the project transcends traditional residency models to enter the realm of Nicolas Bourriaud’s relational aesthetics. Here, the "skin of the relational body" becomes a tangible membrane where the consumption of local viticulture and communal dining are elevated to artistic gestures. This environment fosters a collective artifact, wherein the social interactions and the "unstable nets" of human connection constitute the core material. Lloveras’s approach treats the group dynamic as a living sculpture, suggesting that the true work of art is the sustained, intersubjective experience shared among the diverse cohort of international artists, which includes figures such as Niké Nagy and Michael Cartwright. Lloveras’s "Up the River" action represents a critical evolution in his ongoing engagement with the environment, manifesting what he identifies as a "Hegelian synthesis in praxis." This year’s performance functions as an ontological bridge between previous investigations: the hydro-politics of Eau Non Potable (2012), the semiotic inversions of Palindrome (2014), and the optical narratives of The Light in Provence (2015). By navigating the riparian corridor between Correns and Barjols with a symbolic red bag, Lloveras engages in a peripatetic methodology that recalls the Situationist dérive but with a more rigorous focus on material synthesis. The act of gathering flowers in the intense heat is a performative intersection of the body and the botanical, a physical endurance that maps the landscape onto the artist’s own physiology. This synthesis seeks to reconcile the dualism between the subjective "yellow object" of past wanderings and the objective reality of the river’s current. The resulting work is an ephemeral record of movement, where the "site-specific piece" is less a static object and more a rhythmic oscillation between the artist and the terrain.
