Yellow Bag Series * Rituals (2014–2026)

After more than a decade in uninterrupted activation, the Yellow Bag endures not as an art object but as a situational ritual—silent, mobile, and adaptive—proving that contemporary art can be radically simple, ecologically sustainable, and ontologically contextual. Born within the broader framework of Socioplastics, a high-resolution cultural operating system initiated by Anto Lloveras in 2010, the Yellow Bag operates as a situational fixer, traversing geographies and institutions while absorbing microelements of presence: seeds, sand, leaves, dust, breath. These modest collections accumulate not as trophies, but as a geo-poetic archive, each particle a residue of attention, encounter, and coexistence. Neither curated nor exhibited in a conventional sense, the Yellow Bag is donated to institutions or individuals as a reparative gesture, transforming museums, art spaces, or even domestic interiors into active nodes of shared memory. The Bag thus displaces authorship in favour of distributed care, prioritising presence over possession and process over product. Its form—flexible, foldable, and materially neutral—rehearses a grammar of relational instability, operating not as monument, but as minimal infrastructure for affective repair. Rooted in the Trans-Indigenous ethos of Socioplastics, the Yellow Bag subverts the extractivist logics of collection and ownership by returning presence instead of taking it. Through ritual repetition across sites like Madrid, Cádiz, Galicia, Trondheim, Athens, London, and La Gomera, it deposits not a fixed aesthetic, but an evolving practice of epistemic and spatial listening. Each use activates it anew; each place redraws its meaning. Carried, opened, rested, folded—it is an infrastructure of care, a portable memory unit, a living sculpture that inscribes itself in territory through soft contact and situated engagement. On this logic, even its itinerary—Madrid, Croatia, Provence, Bratislava, Galicia, London, Serbia, Tirol, Lagos, Mallorca, Compostela—is not a record of conquest, but of return and resonance. The Yellow Bag is a social sculpture, yes—but not in the sense of large forms shaping society, but as small mobile forms absorbing it. It offers a tactile, silent resistance to institutional inertia, and an invitation to participate in the reconfiguration of memory through gesture. No leftovers. Love love.

Lloveras, A. (2010–2026) Socioplastics: The Architecture of the Summa (4K). [online] Available at: https://antolloveras.blogspot.com/

YELLOW BAG _____ SITUATIONAL FIXER _________ ARS VIBRATTUM  MADRID CROATIA PROVENCE MADRID BRATISLAVA PRAHA GALICIA MADRID GALICIA SLOVAKIA CÁDIZ MEXICO CÁDIZ MADRID VIENA SERBIA CADIZ GALICIA MÁLAGA CROATIA GALICIA MADRID MÁLAGA MADRID TRONDHEIM MÁLAGA SWEDEN GOPENHAGEN NEGRADAS MADRID GALICIA CÁDIZ MADRID CÁDIZ LONDON IZÁ ATHENS TIROL ÁVILA MADRID EXTREMADURA MADRID ÁVILA EL ESCORIAL CÁDIZ LA GOMERA LAGOS MADRID MÁLAGA GRANADA XILLOI MÁLAGA VALDEMANCO BARBATE MÁLAGA A CORUÑA COMPOSTELA MALLORCA _________IN USE

RECREO * Ritual as Spatial Score and the Frontline Condition * SpaceshipSeries 2021

Recreo Spaceship articulates a mature phase of socio-plastic practice in which space, ritual, and seriality converge into a coherent artistic cosmology. Conceived as a 100 m² interdisciplinary art space, Recreo functions not merely as a venue but as an operative body—a “frontline spaceship” where artistic production unfolds under conditions of continuous instability. The long-running cycle Movements for an Unstable Symphonic Ritual frames this endeavour as a temporal score rather than a fixed exhibition programme. Each series operates as a movement within a larger composition, where artworks, actions, and presences accumulate without closure. Ritual here is stripped of transcendental certainty and reconfigured as procedural repetition: an ethics of return, variation, and endurance. The work insists on instability as a generative condition, aligning spatial practice with the flux of social and political reality in the early 2020s. Recreo thus positions itself against the white-cube logic of neutrality, proposing instead an activated space where art is produced in situ, under pressure, and in relation to others. The symphonic metaphor underscores a collective temporality: meaning emerges through duration and coexistence rather than singular statements.

El Dorado * Shared object, fleeting monument

El Dorado is a socioplastic sculpture of circulation, composed of a single gold emergency blanket passed between artists as a relational relic, an affective infrastructure of temporary possession and symbolic care; created in Madrid in 2013 and evolving across exhibitions, interventions, and informal rituals, the object resists static display, offering instead a loop of collective intimacy, where value emerges from use rather than accumulation; each recipient inscribes their gesture into the blanket—not through writing, but through holding, folding, and handing over—transforming gold from an emblem of extraction into a medium of shared attention; part of the HIPERVÍNCULOS network, the work dissolves the logic of singular authorship by functioning as a living hyperlink between practitioners, geographies, and moods; it is both soft and sacred, disposable and priceless, always on the verge of vanishing into the next context; El Dorado doesn’t mark the end of a quest, but the continuity of care across hands, borders, and scenes.

BLUE BAGS **** UNSTABLE SOCIAL SCULPTURE

Anto Lloveras' Socioplastics practice blends relational art, nomadic/portable objects (Blue Bags as situational fixers and mobile archives), site-specific rituals, minimal architecture, urban interventions, care epistemologies, and social sculpture—emphasizing process, shared authorship, affective memory, and everyday objects as relational nodes. Here are contemporary artists with strong parallels, drawing from relational aesthetics (as theorized by Nicolas Bourriaud), social practice, and transdisciplinary approaches intersecting art, architecture, and urbanism: Rirkrit Tiravanija — Iconic for relational works turning galleries into communal spaces (e.g., cooking and sharing meals). Parallels Lloveras' ritual cooking (Broth), shared objects, and emphasis on affective economies and mutable collectives. Francis Alÿs — Known for poetic urban interventions and ambulatory actions (e.g., walking projects collecting stories/memory in cities). Echoes Lloveras' performative urbanism (LACALLE), nomadic archives, and situational fixers in public space. Tino Sehgal — Creates "constructed situations" via live encounters and improvised interactions (no objects/documentation). Resonates with Lloveras' shared authorship, performative constellations (e.g., Movements for an Unstable Symphonic Ritual), and relational instability as care. Felix Gonzalez-Torres — Portable/takeable objects (e.g., candy piles, poster stacks) as embodied archives of memory/loss. Directly aligns with Lloveras' Portable Memory series (blankets/bags as affective surfaces/archives). Joseph Beuys — Pioneer of "social sculpture" (art shaping society via rituals/actions). Foundational influence on relational practices; mirrors Lloveras' Socioplastics as reparative gestures and collective processes. Sophie Calle — Narrative interventions blending personal memory, surveillance, and relational encounters. Similar to Lloveras' material memory (e.g., textile exile) and positional essays. Theaster Gates → Urban reuse, community rituals, and adaptive architecture (e.g., revitalizing buildings as social relics). Overlaps with Lloveras' minimal/adaptive architecture (Trole Building, El Palmeral) and civic ecology. Other resonant figures include Hélio Oiticica (wearable/participatory works), Liam Gillick (minimal structures as relational backdrops), and Pierre Huyghe (ecological/collective situations). Lloveras' curatorial role via LAPIEZA also evokes artist-curators blending personal practice with relational platforms. These connections stem from shared roots in relational aesthetics, social practice, and post-minimalist traditions prioritizing human interaction over static objects. For deeper dives into specific parallels, explore Bourriaud's Relational Aesthetics or Beuys' expanded art concept.

https://antolloveras.blogspot.com/2025/12/yellow-bag-series.html

BLUE BAGS **** UNSTABLE SOCIAL SCULPTURE ________2014:2023__________________________TRANSLATORIAL_______________________ MADRID BARCELONA BERLÍN CÁDIZ MADRID GALICIA CROATIA MADRID NORWAY MADRID ALICANTE NORWAY BENIDORM ROTTERDAM LONDON MADRID BARCELONA PROVENCE MADRID PRAHA GALICIA SLOVAKIA OSLO TRONDHEIM BERGEN CÁDIZ MEXICO.CITY PUEBLA OAXACA PACIFIC.OCEAN DÜSSELDORF MÁLAGA CÁDIZ GALICIA PORTO MADRID VIENA MADRID BUDAPEST BELGRADE KIKINDA TIMISOARA SUBOTICA CÁDIZ MADRID NORWAY AMSTERDAM MÁLAGA FUENGIROLA CÁDIZ MADRID MÁLAGA MADRID GALICIA ARANJUEZ MADRID GALICIA MADRID MÁLAGA MADRID TRONDHEIM MÁLAGA ALGECIRAS UDDEBO GOTHEMBURG LUND COPENHAGUEN CÁDIZ BOGOTÁ MÁLAGA CÁDIZ LONDON MÁLAGA EL ESCORIAL TENERIFE, LA GOMERA LAGOS, NIGERIA //////// IN USE

Socioplastics is a long-term research practice where architecture, art, performance, and social inquiry converge to produce situations rather than objects.

SOCIOPLASTICS treats space as relational and temporary: light materials, everyday gestures, and collective participation become tools to activate attention, care, and co-presence. Architecture appears here as an action—built, walked, carried, listened to—existing through time, use, memory, and repetition instead of permanence. Across its different lines—ephemeral architectures, relational devices, urban interventions, and platform-based ecosystems—each project functions as a node within the same living system. Objects such as bags, blankets, or briefcases operate as mediators; rituals recalibrate bodies and environments; the city becomes a performative field; and documentation acts as transmission, not closure. Socioplastics is thus an evolving archive: a transdisciplinary grammar where gesture becomes structure, and art becomes a quiet, adaptable infrastructure for connection. 

Socioplastics, UnstableInstallation, SituationalFixer, PortableMemory, RelationalArt, MinimalArchitecture, SocialSculpture, ProcessArt, SiteSpecific, YellowBag, BlueBags, GreenBriefcase, SubtractionSeries, TaxidermySeries, DoubleSided, LaPieza, Urbanas, Nomadism, ArsVibrattum, GeopoeticArchive ephemeral-architecture, relational-art, social-practice, contemporary-art, conceptual-art, installation-art, performance-art, participatory-art, site-specific-art, public-space, urban-intervention, performative-architecture, experimental-architecture, architectural-research, artistic-research, critical-urbanism, social-sculpture, process-based-art, collective-authorship, care-ethics, cultural-ecology, sustainability, decolonial, postcolonial, everyday-life, memory, nomadism, ritual, walking-art, sound-art, mobile-archive, portable-sculpture, minimalism, subtraction, spatial-practice

Super Natural Series MMXIX * Relational Ruralism

In the SuperNatural Series residency hosted by Yuri Dólan in Bokros, Slovakia, the rural becomes radical—not by rupture, but by reweaving presence, ecology, and art into a relational ecosystem where landscape is neither scenery nor resource, but a co-author in the slow choreography of ephemeral creation, embodied attunement, and socio-poetic exchange; this living platform of situational art disrupts the hypermediated pace of contemporary practice, inviting participants to surrender their digital prostheses and re-enter the granular rhythms of field, stone, fire, and voice, as seen in the "Unstable Installation Series", where river stones are aligned in equilateral geometries—not for permanence, but as fragile stabilisers in a setting where flux is form and dissolution is intentional, echoed in ritualistic burnings and the quiet assembly of temporary structures that map human gestures onto vegetal and mineral continuums, offering what LAPIEZA terms "frugal art", deeply intertwined with the Danube’s temporal flow and the scent of cornfields turning; the filmic extension Through Fields. Fire and Mud, with its POV melancholia, refracts this sensibility into lens-based practice, presenting not documentation but a meta-relational encounter, further echoed in bonus gestures like the concrete "POOL" and the "Raw Identity" micro-series, all of which hinge on the tactile intimacy of co-existence, where art becomes the by-product of shared rituals, like toasts over apricot Pálinka or meals assembled from the land itself, gestures that metabolise into social sculpture within a topology activated by fellow artists such as Marta Kiss, Yasmin, and Hala Swal, whose cross-media contributions anchor the residency in a rhizomatic fabric extending beyond Bokros into global fields of similar practice—Mexico, Sweden, Colombia—drawing a cartography of relational aesthetics unbound by spectacle and attuned instead to ecological co-presence, anthropological listening, and performative grounding; in this frame, the Slovakian landscape is not escape but conduit, not nostalgia but method, a site where translocal knowledges meet in embodied slowness, where ceremony dissolves into inquiry and the whispering field outlasts the algorithm.  Lloveras, A. (2019) Super Natural Series Slovakian Ruralism MMXIX Extended Duna. [Online]  https://antolloveras.blogspot.com/2019/08/iza-komarno-slovakiammxix.html

The Iceberg Interface

 

In socioplastic terms, the “iceberg” is not a metaphor of hidden content but a strategy of epistemic protection. What appears on the surface—LAPIEZA’s sparse taxonomy, the reduced menu, the refusal of visual spectacle—is an interface calibrated to preserve the autonomy of the system beneath it. The surface does not communicate meaning; it regulates access. By minimising explanation and affective capture, the interface prevents premature consumption and forces the encounter to unfold relationally. This design choice aligns with sovereign systems theory: what is visible must not exhaust what is operative. The iceberg therefore functions as a membrane between public legibility and internal complexity. It does not conceal depth out of secrecy, but out of care for coherence. In socioplastics, opacity is not elitism; it is structural necessity. The surface stabilises the system by slowing interpretation, allowing the Mesh to remain autopoietic rather than performative.

Time Spliced into Flesh and ImagE * The re-filming of relational bodies as socioaesthetic resistance to digital decay * CUERPOS FILMADOS

The conceptual re-entry into Cuerpos Filmados (Filmed Bodies) two decades after its inception marks a sophisticated shift from the archival to the teleological within the landscape of contemporary socioplastic practice. By revisiting these specific "fixers of human agency" in 2028, Anto Lloveras transitions from a documentarian of the "Fifth City" to a clinical observer of temporal erosion and relational persistence. This process of re-filming is not a mere nostalgic exercise but a rigorous investigation into the "positional essay" as a longitudinal study of biological and urban entropy. The aesthetic gravity of this endeavor lies in the confrontation between the digital permanence of the original 2008–2018 recordings and the inevitable decay or transmutation of the biological subjects. In this second iteration, the camera functions as a connective tissue across time, stitching together the fragmented ecologies of Madrid, Mexico DF, and beyond, thereby validating the "First Decade of Relational Essays" as a foundation for a broader, diachronic critique of how human labor and aesthetic resistance endure within increasingly commodified urban strata.

Transdisciplinary Art as Radical Pedagogy

The work of Anto Lloveras and LAPIEZA articulates a contemporary reconfiguration of Joseph Beuys’s notion of Social Sculpture, not as metaphor but as operative infrastructure. Their practice positions art as a “situational fixer,” a provisional device activated within zones of institutional inertia, urban precarity, and epistemic fragmentation. In this sense, socioplastics does not denote a stylistic tendency but an ethical method: art as a relational instrument that modulates social energies, spatial tensions, and ecological imaginaries. The Portable Archive—comprising the chromatic bags and briefcase—embodies this method through radical portability and symbolic opacity. These nomadic objects operate as epistemic hinges, translating everyday logistics into aesthetic events and civic provocations. Their circulation across Madrid, Lagos, Norway, and Mexico dissolves the ontological boundary between artwork, tool, and witness. What emerges is a trans-temporal archive that privileges process over monumentality, mobility over fixation, and encounter over exhibition. Within this framework, the archive ceases to be a repository of dead time and becomes instead a kinetic interface where memory is continuously renegotiated. Lloveras and LAPIEZA thus reposition the artist not as a producer of objects but as a curator of conditions—someone who orchestrates fragile situations of co-presence, friction, and speculative solidarity. 

Accumulation as Resistance * Open Code and Hypertextual Aesthetics

The notion of accumulation articulated in the LAPIEZA installation in Malasaña constitutes a quietly radical counter-model to dominant economies of visibility, consumption and authorship in contemporary art. Far from a neutral formal strategy, accumulation here operates as a political syntax, an aesthetic grammar through which resistance is enacted materially, spatially and semantically. As Daniel Martín Bayón astutely frames it, LAPIEZA emerges as an open, mutable installation that refuses closure, finality and commodified finish. It stands in marked contrast to the spectacularised logics of the art fair and the biennial, whose industrial scale and fiscal excess often alienate local publics while simulating criticality. In LAPIEZA, by contrast, the artwork is not an object but an evolving condition: a dense, layered ecology of gestures, residues, participations and reinserted signs. Accumulation here does not signify hoarding or excess for its own sake, but rather a temporal ethics of staying-with, of refusing the accelerated obsolescence that structures both consumer capitalism and its aesthetic correlates. The installation thus positions itself as a semiotic commons, a space where meaning is neither stabilised nor privatised, but continually renegotiated through contact, reuse and contextual drift.

From Physical Lots to Hyperlinked Clouds * Socioplastic Frames and Relational Semionautics (2011–2015)

The passage from the socioplastic lot to the relational tag collage marks a decisive epistemic shift in the practice developed around LAPIEZA between 2011 and 2015. What is at stake is not merely a change of format—from physical compilation to hyperlinked image—but a reconfiguration of how artistic relations are indexed, stored, and activated. The socioplastic lot operates as a frontal condensation: a materially bounded object that nonetheless encapsulates a dense web of actions, encounters, and performative residues. As such, it functions as a two-dimensional transfer of a spatial and relational process, a metarepresentational device that renders visible the otherwise ephemeral dynamics of a mutant installation. The later emergence of relational tag collages radicalises this logic by foregrounding hyperlinkability as an aesthetic condition. Here, the lot no longer simply contains relations; it behaves as a cloud of expandable references, a visual interface for navigating a dispersed archive. This transition from physical to virtual does not dematerialise the work but intensifies its relational density, proposing an ecology of signs in which circulation, mobility, and contingency become constitutive formal values rather than secondary effects. Within this framework, the socioplastic lot can be read through the lens of relational aesthetics as articulated by Nicolas Bourriaud. The viewer is positioned as a semionaut, navigating among fragments and references to construct a provisional landscape of meaning. Crucially, these constructions resist closure: they are texts composed of texts, images composed of other images, each fragment saturated with polysemy. 

Relational Space Beyond the Institution (LAPIEZA, Madrid 2008–2012)

 

LAPIEZA emerges as a paradigmatic case of early twenty-first-century relational practice in Spain, articulating instability not as a flaw but as a constitutive method. Active between 2008 and 2012 in Madrid’s Malasaña district, the project defined itself as an “instalación relacional inestable,” a mutable constellation of artistic gestures accumulating through time. Rather than aspiring to completion, LAPIEZA functioned as a living archive of actions, objects, and encounters, structured through periodic “mutations.” Each contribution altered the whole, producing a socio-plastic form whose identity was always provisional. In this sense, LAPIEZA aligns with post-Bourriaudian relational aesthetics while simultaneously critiquing its more convivial and depoliticised iterations. 

Duna Dunaj * Relational Rituals and Situational Memory in Slovakian Residencies * Anthropological Affections and Unstable Installations Along the Danube (Lloveras 2015)

 

In the realm of contemporary relational aesthetics, Anto Lloveras's "Duna Dunaj" residency in Slovakia, documented in September 2015, exemplifies a metamodern oscillation between the ephemeral and the archival, where art emerges not as isolated object but as a dynamic interplay of bodies, landscapes, and temporalities. Drawing from Nicolas Bourriaud's foundational theories on relational art, Lloveras positions the residency as a "situational and relational" laboratory, hosted by Yuri Dolan across two stages: Dunajská Streda and the Kómarno eco-farm. Here, the artist eschews traditional studio confines, opting instead for performative walks, ritualistic collections, and conversational interventions that weave human agency into the socio-natural fabric.

Positional Essays * A Decade of Relational Essays * FILM

The seminal series Cuerpos Filmados (Filmed Bodies), spanning the decade from 2008 to 2018, represents a monumental effort in the cataloguing of Active Socioplastics. This project, a cornerstone of Anto Lloveras’s "Positional Essays," functions as an online meta-film—a rhizomatic archive that captures the intersection of relational art, urbanism, and performance. By documenting a vast constellation of agents—from established thinkers like David Harvey and Jonas Mekas to flamenco masters at Casa Patas and avant-garde architects like Iñaki Ábalos—the series constructs a "Social Sculpture" that is both digital and corporeal. These are not merely portraits; they are situational fixers of human agency, recorded at the precise moment where their professional "work" bleeds into the aesthetic fabric of the city. The methodology of Filmados operates on the principle of the "Relational Art Series," where the camera acts as a connective tissue between disparate urban territories. Whether capturing the "Gourmet Anthropophagy" of César Martínez Silva in Mexico DF or the "Algorithmic Solidarity" of connected subjects with Remedios Zafra, the decade of work explores the body as a site of political and spatial resistance. The archive maps a global trajectory—Madrid, Mexico City, Trondheim, Santo Domingo—treating each location as a laboratory for Socioplastic research. By archiving these "filmed bodies," Lloveras and his collaborators at LAPIEZA Art Series have created a permanent record of the "Fifth City," a space where architecture, epistemology, and art converge to challenge the transience of the digital age.

Crushed Memories and Toxic Affections *The Relational Ecology of SERIE PAN * Decolonial Sequences and the Sociology of Superjunk

 

The SERIE PAN (2010), a pivotal movement within the broader LAPIEZA decolonial exhibition sequence curated by Anto Lloveras, functions as a visceral archive of "emotional residues." This series marks a transition toward a "Superjunk" aesthetic, where the debris of urban consumption—crushed memories, street icons, and industrial leftovers—are reconfigured into portable research units. Spanning 180 series over 15 years, the project treats time as raw material, transforming the act of curating into a form of durational writing. Within SERIE PAN, artworks are not static objects but nodes in a "temporary public," where the contributions of diverse agents like Krapoola, Paula Lloveras, and Tomoto coalesce into a socioplastic landscape of ruins and resurrections. At the core of the series lies the concept of Crushed Memories, where the iconography of the street is appropriated and intervened upon. Using "Superjunk" as a conceptual motor, the artists explore the "second life" of objects—be it the second life of a tree or the tattooing of toast by Hombre U. These works, such as "Tostadas Fuck" and the "Toxic Pan" by Paula Lloveras, utilize organic decay as a metaphor for urban fragility. The concentric progression of mold becomes a poetic and musical project (as seen in the collaboration for the Son-Nús album), where the synergy of voices and visual typography creates a tactile oxidation of the domestic sphere.

The Relational Topology of EL DORADO * Gold as Shared Gesture within the Hipervínculos Network (2013)

EL DORADO represents a radical inversion of the myth of extraction. Conceived in the summer of 2003 upon Lloveras’s return from a six-month immersion in Mexico City, this intervention replaces the colonial fantasy of gold with a "sculpture of survival." The material—a single, ultra-light golden emergency blanket (typically used to shield bodies in distress)—is displaced from its utilitarian context to become a migratory sculptural skin. Weighing only twenty grams, the object functions as a "positional fixator" that is passed from body to body, resisting the static monumentality of traditional art in favor of a shared, performative circulation. This work marks the genesis of a decade-long series of "Light Interventions" (including the white and gray meshes of Provence), where the sculpture is not an addition to the space, but a "rhetorical device" that takes shape through human contact. Within the HIPERVÍNCULOS network, EL DORADO operates as a living loop. Each participant—from Toño Camuñas to Maite Cajaraville—does not receive a copy, but the original object, which is re-sculpted by their posture, mood, and presence. The gold here is not found or stolen; it is offered, creating a temporary fold of care and intimacy in the urban lodazal. Conceptually, the project deconstructs the weight of the artistic link. By using a material so thin it borders on the non-existent, Lloveras proves that "Affection is Fuel." The sculpture is no longer a finished product but a "relational state," a tactile bridge that visualizing the invisible threads of collective agency. In EL DORADO, the value is relocated from the mineral to the gesture, transforming the emergency blanket into a sacred, nomadic archive of the creative community in Madrid.

EL DORADO (Madrid, 2013) constitutes a seminal exploration into the "weight of the bond," manifesting as a migratory socioplastic sculpture that eschews traditional monumentality for a radical, material minimalism. Conceived by Anto Lloveras as an essential node within the broader HIPERVÍNCULOS relational platform, the work utilizes a single, twenty-gram golden emergency blanket that is passed from body to body. This object—charged with the symbolic density of survival and intimacy—is sculpted anew through the specific posture, mood, and presence of each participating artist, including figures such as Maite Cajaraville, Juan Barte, and Monoperro. By deploying a material that is literally and metaphorically "light," Lloveras ensures that the sculpture functions primarily as a gesture, transforming gold from a hidden, extracted myth into a visible, shared "fold of care". The conceptual underpinnings of EL DORADO rely on the inversion of the colonial myth; rather than a sought-after treasure, the "gold" is localized in the city of origin and offered as a temporary relational state. Within the HIPERVÍNCULOS cloud—a network of relational exhibitions and conceptual drifts—the sculpture operates not as a static edition but as a "living rhetorical device". Each artist in the sculptural loop (such as RafaFans, Vic Snake, and Paula Lloveras) is inscribed into a collective imagination where "affection is fuel," displacing the artwork from the physical object into the shared proximity between subjects. This socioplastic approach treats art as an evolving curatorial platform where ephemeral actions and situated sculptures weave together a network of relational states.

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.

Environmental Psychology and the Social Construction of Space * Reclaiming the Right to Urban Meaning * UAM

 

Positioned at the intersection of environmental psychology and urban morphology, this intervention activates a critical discourse emerging from the 2024 UAM course, The Experience of the City. Speaking from the framework of socioplastics, I address the growing friction between strictly technical urban planning and the lived, symbolic necessity of shared space. Why this reflection now? Because our contemporary environments are suffering from "symbolic poverty"—a sterilization of the public realm that severs the connection between the citizen and the street. By situating this voice within the multidisciplinary debate of architects, biologists, and psychologists, the work addresses the urgency of "rehumanizing" our infrastructure, moving beyond decorative greening to treat the city as a performative and epistemic field where urban dignity is at stake. The core device explored here is the "Public Space as Communication," an operational system where morphology, vegetation, and collective memory function as structural agents. Rather than treating the city as a static grid, the methodology proposed by contributors like José Antonio Corraliza and Enric Pol views the urban fabric as a behaving system. The process involves deconstructing traditional typologies to reveal how "urban green" acts as a vehicle for identity and acoustic comfort. By liberating the interior of urban blocks from traffic—as suggested by Salvador Rueda—the project reimagines the spatial status of the citizen. This is not a symbolic gesture; it is a functional reconfiguration of the city’s operational logic, where the "blitz" of naturalness in marginal lots acts as a micro-reservoir of urban health.

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.