Duna Dunaj Symposium: Resident Artists as Living Sculptures in Ritualistic Residencies * Video Documentaries and Relational Networks Along Slovakian Lakes and Danube Shores (Lloveras 2015)

The Duna Dunaj artist residency in Slovakia, spanning Dunajská Streda and Kómarno in September 2015, featured a diverse array of international creators engaging in situational memory-building through rituals, walks, and communal presentations. In the first stage, resident artists included YURI DOLAN, MÁRTA KISS, GILAH HIRSCH, GILBERTO DELGADO, TÉREZA MINÁRIKOVA, AFARIN SAJEDI, ATTILAH, ROBERT, EDITH, GYÖRG, and guest BERNARD eating an apple, showcasing works like copos urban video series #486 #487 #488 (2008-2015), urban jewel #75 brown streda on my hand (2011-2015), protista #5 streda minimal whiteness installation junk monochromes (2012-2015), black shoes and bag performative readymades, hello urban green environmental research collection of seeds tactile oxidation (2014-2015), in cold water private ritual series (2015), no leftovers black pants black shirt black shoes green hat basic identity sculpture, blue bags translatorial unstable social usable sculpture with Yuri Dolan and Márta Kiss (2014-2015), soundtrack by El Intruso album 334 (September 2015). Transitioning to the second stage at the eco-farm near the Danube, amid potato and corn fields, horses, pigs, and sheep, the cohort expanded with POONEH JAFARINEJAD, JULIA OVANESSIAN, GIOVANNI AVASHADUR, STANO CERNY, GILBERTO DELGADO, YURI DOLAN, EVA CSEMY, MÁRIA CHILF, SHAHPARI BEHZADI, MÁRTA KISS, FERENC PETERLA - SEÑOR, GABRIELA MEDVEDOVA, ALI SOLTANI, MARION ALBRECHT, MICHAELA LESKOVÁ, DANIELA JÁUREGUI, JORGE GONZÁLEZ VELÁZQUEZ, LALO SÁNCHEZ DEL VALLE, AFARIN SAJEDI, NIKÉ NAGY, SHEYMA KHASHKHASKI, TEREZA MINÁRIKOVA, GERARD ZAOUI, ANTO LLOVERAS, producing onsite works such as meat 139 140 141, copos komárno 489 490, hello urban green natural poems, small stones platonic stones, protista #6 kómarno junk code series graphics, blue bags with Afarin Señor Gabriela Eva Sheyma Pooneh Maria Stano, yellow bag Giovanni walking kómarno, best beach with snails, mentol pack, black shoes and mud. Soundtrack by El Intruso 335 Spirit of Time.

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.