Emerging between 2013 and 2016 across Mexico City, Oaxaca, and the Pacific coast, the MUDAS Series by Anto Lloveras constitutes a dispersed investigation into the metabolic temporality of matter, wherein organic decay becomes the primary artistic medium. The project’s conceptual nucleus resides in an austere yet symbolically dense procedure: the single-leaf protocol, whereby a banana, tamal, or maize leaf—materials deeply embedded in Mexican culinary ritual—is affixed to a wall with a solitary pin. This minimal gesture inaugurates an unfolding process of oxidative evolution, during which the initially vibrant vegetal surface progressively desiccates, curls, fractures, and darkens while simultaneously emitting a dense aromatic residue that permeates the surrounding environment. In this configuration, scent supersedes objecthood; the work gradually migrates from visible form to atmospheric presence, thereby enacting what may be described as a socioplastic oxidation, a relational transformation where material metabolises into memory, odour, and spatial affect. Early iterations in Mexico City, notably the sequence MUDAS 001–017: Oxidación Plástico Aromática, arranged leaves in subtle anthropomorphic constellations within Showroom Virreyes, producing corporeal analogies between vegetal epidermis and human dermis. Subsequent manifestations in Oaxaca workshops and the coastal site of Mazunte intensified the project’s environmental entanglements, as humidity, salt air, and time accelerated decomposition. Through these processes the installation performs a poetics of shedding—a structural analogy to biological moulting—where form relinquishes stability to reveal relational flux. The retrospective reframings of 2026 articulate the series as a foundational experiment within Socioplastics, prefiguring later protocols concerned with organic entropy and epistemic hardening. Ultimately, MUDAS demonstrates that decay, far from signifying disappearance, functions as an infrastructural condition of ritual memory and sensory persistence, where absence itself becomes the final sculptural event.
