Supernatural Series and the Ethics of Listening

The Supernatural Series occupies a pivotal position within Anto Lloveras’s socioplastics, marking a decisive shift from urban critique toward an ethics of ecological listening. Active since at least 2015, the series reframes artistic intervention as a practice of attunement rather than inscription. Where the Taxidermy series dissected the city as an animal-body subjected to extraction and display, Supernatural withdraws from the metropolitan metabolism to engage rural and natural contexts as living, autonomous systems. This is not a romantic return to nature, but a critical recalibration of scale, time, and agency. The series privileges impermanence, contextual ritual, and minimal presence, aligning with broader post-anthropocentric debates in contemporary art and environmental humanities. Landscapes are treated not as neutral backdrops but as epistemic fields—sites that speak through wind, sediment, seasonal rhythms, and decay. Lloveras’s gestures are deliberately light: subtraction, concealment, walking, collecting. In this sense, Supernatural functions as a counter-model to extractive cultural production, proposing instead a reparative, zero-waste praxis that understands fragility as a political condition rather than a deficiency.

Ephemeral Rituals and the Supernatural Wall * The Light in Cádiz as FoodArt Synthesis

In the ongoing Supernatural series, Anto Lloveras utilizes the architectural skin of Cádiz as a "recently activated" canvas for the installation of 12 Tagarninas—a project that harmonizes local wild food with ritualistic performance. By arranging these indigenous plants in a circular formation, specifically defined by the physical reach of the artist’s arm, Lloveras creates a temporary altar that bridges the gap between the mundane act of eating and the sacred act of display. This "Wall Ritual" is not intended for permanence; it operates on the principle of "No Leftovers," where the sequence—Take Display, Picture, Cook, Eat, Post—transforms the artwork from a visual object into a biological one. Drawing conceptual lineage from aboriginal Mexican food rituals and his own "As Far as the Arm Can Reach" sub-series, Lloveras recontextualizes the tagarnina as a symbol of regional identity and ephemeral beauty, proving that socioplastics can be both visually arresting and literally digestible. 

The Supernatural Series * Mediations in the Slovakian Duna

 

The "Super Natural Series" residency in Bokros, Slovakia, serves as a compelling site for examining the intersection of ruralism and ritualistic performance within the contemporary ecocritical framework. Hosted by Yuri Dólan at a historic farm near the Danube, this project transcends the traditional residency model by functioning as a "situational and relational" laboratory where the landscape is treated as a "natural canvas". The artist’s deliberate abandonment of digital tethers—notably the absence of a cellphone—facilitates an "extra focus" on real-time experience and context. This ontological shift allows for the creation of "frugal art," characterized by small-scale, ritualistic interventions such as the burning of natural installations by the river. These acts are not merely aesthetic gestures but are deeply rooted in a "positional essay" that explores the dialogue between human agency and the green cornfields and browning sunflowers of the Slovakian interior. A central pillar of the Bokros residency is the "Unstable Installation Series," which utilizes local materials to challenge the permanence of the art object. In the "Sets Bokros" works, the artist employs smooth river stones to create equilateral triangles, a "classic" geometric form that provides a stabilizing counterpoint to the fluidity of the natural environment. Complementing these physical interventions is the 8-minute digital film, Through Fields. Fire and Mud, which provides a "direct point of view" narrative of transit toward a house, underscored by a melancholic score. This film, alongside bonus works like the readymade concrete "POOL," exemplifies the "Raw Identity" video series, where the camera acts as a meta-documentary tool. The integration of these digital records with the physical "frugal" installations creates a layered archive that fixates the fleeting atmosphere of the rural setting into a permanent, yet unstable, cognitive structure. 

Fast Heartbeat in Ice-Cold Water * The Ritual Body Against Nordic Nature

The action of a man swimming at night in ice-cold water, framed as part of the Supernatural series, operates as a radical condensation of endurance, vulnerability, and symbolic excess. Situated within a Nordic fjord in Norway and discussed in the critical context of NTNU Architectural Design, the work reactivates the body as a site of epistemic risk. Far from spectacle, the gesture is austere: a solitary figure entering lethal water. The cold becomes both medium and antagonist. This is not nature romanticised, but nature weaponised against comfort. The fast heartbeat—implicit, unseen—functions as the true narrative engine, indexing the thin margin between life and collapse. Within contemporary performance discourse, the piece aligns with practices where the body tests limits not for heroism but for cognition. The swim is an essay written in breath, muscle contraction, and temporal suspension. As such, it repositions architecture and landscape not as shelters, but as conditions that expose the fragility of the human measure. The nocturnal dimension intensifies the work’s ontological stakes. Darkness erases orientation, transforming the fjord into an abstract void where perception falters. This withdrawal of visual certainty foregrounds proprioception and fear as primary materials. In art-historical terms, the action resonates with post-minimal performance, yet departs from its neutral phenomenology. Here, the cold is not a parameter but an ethical provocation. The body’s exposure recalls ascetic rituals, while refusing transcendental consolation. The Supernatural label is thus ironic: nothing exceeds nature; rather, nature exceeds the subject. The work’s critical strength lies in its refusal of metaphorical safety. Water is not symbolic purification; it is threat. Time stretches according to survival rhythms, aligning the piece with durational art where duration is not measured but endured. In this sense, the swim becomes a micro-politics of resistance against thermal capitalism, comfort culture, and the domestication of experience. It insists that meaning may still arise from direct confrontation with elemental forces.