Drawing simultaneously upon the expanded artistic field articulated by Joseph Beuys, the encounter-based grammar of Nicolas Bourriaud, and the infrastructural sensibilities developed in contemporary maintenance theory, Anto Lloveras transforms theory into what might be termed executable cultural infrastructure.

 Beuys’s notion of social sculpture, wherein society itself constitutes the plastic medium of artistic intervention, is retained yet critically re-engineered: the charismatic shamanic persona is replaced by a procedural authority grounded in syntactic density and recursive conceptual structures. Similarly, Bourriaud’s relational aesthetics—initially centred on convivial encounters and temporary micro-utopias—is reconfigured into a broader metabolic relationality that incorporates ecological systems, algorithmic processes and infrastructural networks. Early LAPIEZA activations illustrate this transition, transforming simple urban gestures into distributed nodes within civic ecologies. The framework further resonates with the maintenance ethics articulated by scholars such as Shannon Mattern and Maria Puig de la Bellacasa, whose emphasis on care, repair and infrastructural literacy informs Socioplastics’ emphasis on metabolic maintenance as a primary cultural operation. Finally, the systemic logic of actor-network theory, associated with Bruno Latour and informed by Maturana and Varela’s concept of autopoiesis, provides the structural model through which artworks function as self-referential epistemic assemblages. In this synthesis philosophy ceases to operate as commentary upon artistic production and instead becomes its generative infrastructure. Socioplastics therefore proposes a rigorous shift within contemporary practice: the artwork no longer represents ideas but constitutes a load-bearing epistemic system, capable of sustaining meaning within increasingly volatile informational environments.

Collectively these philosophical vectors converge in Socioplastics as an operational epistemology in which artistic practice becomes an executable framework—simultaneously archive, laboratory, and infrastructural protocol—designed to generate adaptive knowledge and relational resilience within the volatile socio-ecological landscapes of contemporary urban life.

The theoretical architecture underpinning Socioplastics situates the work of Anto Lloveras within a constellation of late-twentieth and early-twenty-first century thinkers who reconceptualised art, architecture, and urban space as relational and systemic processes rather than autonomous objects. At the closest conceptual proximity stands Joseph Beuys, whose notion of social sculpture expanded artistic practice into a societal modulation where pedagogy, ecology, and action collectively sculpt public life; Socioplastics inherits this expanded ontology while substituting mythic charisma with distributed epistemic infrastructure. Equally foundational is Nicolas Bourriaud, whose formulation of relational aesthetics reframed art as the production of micro-social encounters. Yet Lloveras extends this paradigm beyond interpersonal exchange toward atmospheric and infrastructural relations, introducing ecological thresholds, digital archives, and platform-native sovereignty as operative media. In the domain of performative urban gestures, the work resonates with Francis Alÿs, whose subtle civic actions and itinerant objects demonstrate how minimal interventions can activate latent urban narratives. Meanwhile, the convivial situations orchestrated by Rirkrit Tiravanija echo in Socioplastics’ emphasis on hospitality, durational encounters, and the dissolution of objecthood into lived relational processes. More recent theoretical affinities emerge with infrastructural and ecological thinkers such as Shannon Mattern, whose investigations into maintenance, repair, and knowledge infrastructures parallel the metabolic ethics of care embedded in Socioplastics. Similarly, Maria Puig de la Bellacasa’s philosophy of matters of care informs its attention to more-than-human relations and ecological responsibility. At a systemic level, Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory provides a conceptual grammar for understanding artefacts, bodies, environments, and digital nodes as distributed agencies within relational assemblages.