03 | Research * AFFECTION ARCHIVES (Crossing Ecology, Anthropology, and Space)

AFFECTION ARCHIVES adopts the relentless curiosity of polar explorers, submariners, and cosmonauts—those who dream of the absolute frontier and the extreme limits of the known. This is research re-imagined as an extreme durational act, mapping the physics of affection and the portable memory of the connected subject amidst the noise of digital globalisation. Like those who venture into the void, we investigate the psycho-environmental matrix of small urban spaces and the ontological shift of the discarded object. By utilizing the cultural device as a situational probe, we treat knowledge not as inert data, but as a metabolic substance required for survival in the vast, unstable territories of the socioplastic network. In this framework, "Affection is Fuel," and the archive acts as a thermodynamic engine that prevents the dissipation of intellectual energy. It is a commitment to the "longue durée," ensuring that the invisible threads of collective memory remain operative and legible across multiple temporal and geographical layers.

001-WORK-SATELLITE: https://antolloveras.blogspot.com/2026/01/the-ontological-shift-translatorial-and.html 089 Protistas: https://antolloveras.blogspot.com/2026/01/protistas-as-urban-micrology-diom-of.html 062-WORK-SEMIOTICS: https://antolloveras.blogspot.com/2026/01/the-semiotics-of-cloud-active.html 

Research is developed through fieldwork, urban analysis, environmental psychology, and interdisciplinary collaboration. Projects combine ethnography, mapping, ecological data, and artistic methods to generate new tools for understanding cities, communities, and spatial experience.

Research is practiced as a fieldwork of thought, inseparable from the urgencies of urban life, ecology, and cultural transformation. It is not a distant academic exercise but a situated method, moving through plazas, neighbourhoods, forests, and biennials with the same intensity as installations or performances. To research here means to inhabit complexity, to trace atmospheres, to collect data and stories, and to translate them into forms that are both poetic and practical. The project Postory, developed at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, explored gentrification and urban memory by combining ethnographic interviews, mapping, and artistic intervention. It showed how narratives of displacement could become not only research material but a collective tool for reclaiming the city. Similarly, the CASOENAC UNESCO project in Colima, Mexico, addressed accessibility and ageing in public space. By involving local communities, institutions, and psychologists, the project transformed environmental psychology into an instrument for designing inclusive, emotionally resonant urban spaces. Research often blurs with pedagogy and exhibition. The Small Urban Spaces Study in Madrid engaged over 500 participants to measure environmental quality, vegetation, and psychological restoration across pocket parks. Its findings—on safety, vegetation, and affect—were both scientific and cultural, proposing plazas as emotional lungs of the city. In Norway, collaborations with NTNU linked architectural prototyping to ecological and ethnographic studies, producing hybrid outputs: diagrams, videos, and built fragments that were at once research and artwork. This approach insists on interdisciplinarity as necessity: anthropology meets architecture, psychology meets performance, ecology meets installation. Research is carried out with the same fragility as art—embracing incompleteness, open formats, and the refusal of closure. Rather than producing final conclusions, it generates tools for imagination, devices that communities and institutions can adapt, dispute, or extend. In this sense, research becomes part of the socioplastic ecology: a choreography of knowledge where data, narrative, and performance circulate. Its purpose is not to stabilise but to enable transformation—of places, of policies, and of collective perception.

NODES

001-TOPO-URBANISM: Shaded, Collective, and Walkable Landscapes

002-TOPO-ARCHITECTURE: Minimal, Porous, and Open to the World

003-TOPO-RESEARCH: Crossing Ecology, Anthropology, and Space

004-TOPO-TEACHING: Workshops, Studios, and Radical Pedagogy

005-TOPO-ESSAYS: Writing Becomes Spatial

006-TOPO-EXHIBITIONS: Biennials, Triennials, and Museums

007-TOPO-ART: Installations, Performances, and Objects

008-TOPO-SERIES: Articulating Practice as Ecologies

009-TOPO-COLLECTIVES: Shared Authorship as Epistemic Strategy

010-TOPO-FILMS: Essay, Performance, and the Archive

Research within the mesh functions as a FieldEpistemology, a transdisciplinary crossing that bridges the gap between ecological systems and human anthropology. We navigate the network through a MetabolicCartography, where authority is decentralized and recirculated via a systemic operating system. This journey proceeds through a strategic EarthenWithdrawal, reclaiming the physical weight of the world to power the system’s ongoing metabolic drive.

CREP 2011 * Cultural Device Between Knowledge and Practice

CREP—Culturas, Representaciones, Espacios y Prácticas—emerges in the Madrid Region as a paradigmatic case of how science and culture can be articulated as a shared epistemic project rather than as parallel, insulated domains. Far from functioning as a conventional research network, CREP operates as an infrastructure of thought, staging encounters between theory, practice, and public space. Its emphasis on cultures, representations, spaces, and practices foregrounds a relational understanding of knowledge, one that is produced through interaction rather than accumulation. Science is positioned not as an autonomous system of truths but as a cultural force embedded in social, political, and artistic contexts. This framing is crucial: it displaces positivist hierarchies and opens scientific discourse to critical scrutiny, performativity, and aesthetic mediation. CREP’s activities—seminars, symposia, exhibitions, and training programmes—constitute a distributed pedagogy, where learning is inseparable from debate and situated experience. The network thus aligns with contemporary shifts in knowledge production that privilege interdisciplinarity and reflexivity. In this sense, CREP can be read as a curatorial gesture at the scale of research itself, organising not objects but relations, not exhibitions but conditions of intelligibility. The 2011 Strategic Seminar, centred on “Cuerpos: Culturas, Representaciones, Espacios y Prácticas,” crystallises this orientation by placing the body at the centre of epistemic inquiry. The body here is not merely an object of study but a methodological lens through which knowledge is enacted and contested. Contributions by figures such as Daniel Martín Bayón and Kira O’Reilly—invited by LaPieza—underscore the importance of artistic practice in challenging disciplinary boundaries. Their work foregrounds embodiment, vulnerability, and material presence as critical tools, destabilising abstract notions of space and representation. Within the CREP framework, performance and conceptual art are not illustrative supplements to theory but active producers of knowledge. The seminar format itself becomes performative: a space where discourse, gesture, and institutional context intersect. By hosting these encounters in hybrid venues such as HUB Madrid, CREP reinforces its commitment to public knowledge spaces that are neither strictly academic nor purely cultural. The body thus functions as a site where scientific, artistic, and social discourses converge, making visible the power relations and assumptions that underpin them.