MUDAS * From Leaf to Scent * Installations of Oxidation in Mexico ^ Ritual * SOCIOPLASTICS

Between 2013 and 2016, the MUDAS series unfolded across Mexico City, Oaxaca, and the Pacific coast as a dispersed experiment in ephemeral materiality and sensorial rupture. Rather than fixed artworks, these installations operated as oxidative gestures, each composed of a single fresh leaf—banana, tamal, maize—pinned to a wall and left to decay in situ. The process was slow, olfactory, and public: within 48 to 72 hours, green gave way to ochre, moisture seeped into the surface, and an intense, humid aroma filled the air. Viewers didn’t just look—they inhaled, waited, documented, posed. Some touched. Others watched it curl. 

Socioplastics and the Urban Palimpsest * Reclaiming Memory Against Homogenization

 

The urgency of this intervention arises from the rapid erosion of local identity within the contemporary urban landscape, specifically under the pressures of gentrification and turistization. As a curator and researcher at the UAM Madrid, my voice is activated from the friction between academic discourse and the lived reality of communities facing cultural displacement. We are witnessing a systemic flattening of the city, where memory is often treated as an obstacle to profit rather than a foundational human right. This piece is a response to that flattening—a necessary rupture in the seamless narrative of urban progress. It addresses the "socioplastic" need to reshape our environments not through top-down mandates, but through the tactile, messy, and urgent demands of collective memory. By situating this work within the framework of the Human Rights and Culture Congress, we acknowledge that the right to a city is inextricably linked to the right to preserve one’s cultural ecology against the homogenizing forces of global capital. At the core of this project lies a process-based investigation into the material residues of the neighborhood—a method of "urban gleaning" that transforms discarded narratives into active socioplastic structures. The process begins with the systematic collection of oral histories and physical artifacts from sites slated for redevelopment. These elements are not merely archived; they are reconfigured into modular, mobile installations that drift through the city. This operational logic treats the artwork as a living organism: a series of translucent panels and soundscapes that mutate based on their physical proximity to the public. Each module functions as a sensory bridge, sequencing memories of local labor and domestic life into the very streets from which they are being erased. The work behaves as a feedback loop, where the material density of the past is layered over the sterile surfaces of the present, forcing a physical encounter with what has been made invisible.

Easy Rider * Infrastructures for Nomadic Urbanism

 

Set within the evolving infrastructures of Madrid—a city marked by the long aftermath of the 2008 housing collapse, ongoing mobility shifts, and deepening climate pressures—Easy Rider operates as a speculative housing prototype that fuses domestic life with kinetic freedom. Developed by the agencies URBANAS and LAPIEZA, the project revisits an honorable mention from the 2018 Experimental Housing Competition not as a nostalgic artifact, but as an operative lens to reimagine collective dwelling. Rooted in the concept of socioplastics, the proposal reflects a broader investigation into how architecture can act as a social fixer, engaging material forms, circulatory flows, and infrastructural systems. It responds to post-pandemic conditions that have amplified demands for spatial autonomy, shared resources, and resilient urban habitats—particularly within Southern European contexts where precarity and overexposure to climate extremes increasingly intersect.

Red line * Soft architecture * Inflated gestures * Urban frictions

Red Line functions as a nomadic, portable infrastructure designed to test the limits of Pneumatic Friction in public space. The sculpture’s materiality is inherently contradictory: a fragile, high-visibility skin of red industrial tape housing a dense core of "Superjunk"—plastic debris scavenged from the high-stress environment of Calle Montera. By relocating the waste of the "lodazal" into a sculptural format, Lloveras performs an act of Urban Phagocytosis, where the discarded remnants of the consumerist cycle are metabolized into a vibrant, pressurized signal of presence. In the lineage of Claes Oldenburg’s soft architectures and the radical constructs of the Russian avant-garde, the Red Line operates as a Situational Fixer. It is a "breathable barrier" that occupies the void of the sidewalk, forcing the pedestrian to physically negotiate a path around the discarded mass of their own city. This is the Ethics of the Discarded: the sculpture does not represent waste; it is waste re-coded as agency. Whether carried through the city or installed in a gallery, the line serves as a chromatic anchor that visualizes the invisible threads of urban movement and the heavy weight of our collective metabolic leftovers.

There are moments when the city’s surfaces feel too smooth, too compliant—when the built environment, engineered for efficiency and flow, begins to erase our physical presence within it. Red Line is activated from this condition, from a sense that something essential has been lost in the frictionless choreography of modern urban life. Positioned from within a networked, mobile curatorial practice that treats the street not just as backdrop but as volatile site, this project emerges as a refusal to glide. It proposes an intervention that slows us down, tangles us up, asks something of our bodies. This work was necessary now because the city has become an interface—tapped, swiped, and spectated more than inhabited. By reintroducing a stubborn material presence into those soft zones between architecture and movement, Red Line calls for a recalibration of our sensory and spatial attention. It interrupts the seamless scroll of place, insisting instead on touch, scale, and negotiation. At its core, Red Line is a sculptural system built around a single gesture: the insertion of a long, pressurized red form—a flexible cylinder of air, pigment, and plastic—into various urban and domestic architectures. This form behaves like a soft architectural wedge, a tool that bends the existing logic of space without destroying it. In the 2011 iterations Exotic Plants and Korv, the object was wedged into windows, dragged across floors, held aloft by participants or cut across reflective glass. The process is deliberately analog: inflate, position, suspend, adjust. 

Each placement is both a spatial interruption and a form of measurement—testing the limits of openings, walls, and bodies. The method is iterative, parasitic, and adaptive. There is no ideal placement; instead, the red line responds to each site with improvised tension. It expands until the room resists, or the participants can no longer hold it. It is not merely installed—it occupies. This sculptural logic connects with a broader curatorial approach that treats objects not as static displays but as active, relational tools. In this, Red Line finds resonance with Jane Bennett’s notion of vibrant matter, where the object itself exerts force and participates in the choreography of the encounter. The red cylinder is not symbolic—it acts. It shifts the agency of the installation from the artist to the materials, the site, and the bodies required to stabilize or adapt it. Nicolas Bourriaud’s Relational Aesthetics offers another entry point, though Red Line departs from its convivial mode and veers toward precarious collaboration: participants are not invited to engage but compelled to hold, balance, and support. One might also trace this logic through Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizomatic thought—the red form behaves not as a singular expression but as a mobile connector, tracing new links between window and floor, human and surface. These references scaffold the work lightly, emphasizing a curatorial method grounded in distributed agency and shared construction rather than centralized authorship.

Blitz Beton Rotterdam * The Artificial Geologies of Porous Concrete (2000)

 

Activated from the porous intersection of the Museumpark in Rotterdam, this investigation returns to the 2000 Blitz Beton workshop to address a persistent friction: the perceived rigidity of urban matter versus the fluidity of social experience. Speaking from the perspective of socioplastics—a transdisciplinary terrain where architecture and epistemology converge—I engage with these light concrete sculptures not as static historical artifacts, but as urgent catalysts for rethinking contemporary urban density. In an era of rapid architectural obsolescence, the necessity of this work lies in its ability to challenge the heavy, permanent logic of the city through a methodology of speed and translucency. By situating the project within the specific ecological and social fabric of the Museumpark, it addresses a mode of attention that values the "blitz"—the sudden, high-intensity intervention—as a way to puncture the standardized rhythms of the built environment and reveal the latent potential of ephemeral permanence. 

The core of the Blitz Beton process, developed in collaboration with Siebe Bakker and Jun Aoki, is an operational logic of material inversion. Traditional concrete, typically associated with opacity and mass, is here re-engineered into a series of functional systems that prioritize luminosity and structural lightness. The method involves a high-speed casting sequence where specialized aggregates and light-transmitting elements are integrated into the pour, allowing the resulting sculptures to behave as filters for the surrounding urban atmosphere. These are not merely symbolic gestures of transparency; they are sequenced experiments in material behavior. The process demands a rigorous choreography of mixing, molding, and curing that compresses the timeline of architectural production into a performative event. By manipulating the internal structure of the concrete, the work unfolds as a rhythmic interaction between gravity and light, transforming the Museumpark into a laboratory for testing the limits of structural translucency.

Luminous Connectors * Distributed Agency in Exquisite Mechanics

 

Writing from the vantage point of the post-industrial street, I position this voice within the friction of the "smart city" that has forgotten the weight of its own hardware. Exquisite Mechanics is activated now as a necessary response to the increasing invisibility of urban infrastructure. It emerges from a place where the conceptual meets the ecological—specifically, an ecology of objects. This work is urgent because it addresses the modes of attention we owe to the systems that sustain our mobility. It operates within the tension of the "distributed," where the curatorial act is not a static display but a method of tracking movement. By placing these luminous, mechanical-biological surrogates into the urban grid, the project creates a site of friction against the seamless digital drift, demanding that we look at the joints and seams of our lived environment. The core device of this series is an operational logic of "modular tethering." Using pressurized, pigmented membranes—soft architectural probes—the process involves wedging these vibrant volumes into the structural gaps of the city. The material logic is one of inflation and tension; these are not merely sculptures but functional systems that test the load-bearing capacity of a space. The method follows a strict sequence: identification of a spatial void, the manual introduction of the pneumatic body, and the subsequent documentation of its occupancy. Medium and structure are inseparable here; the red "korv" (sausage-like form) behaves as a soft lever, its behavior unfolding as it adapts to the rigid geometry of stone and glass. It is a choreography of pressure that reveals the hidden dimensions of the urban container through a direct, material deployment.

Kingdom Series * Subtraction Art Interventions in European Landscapes

Revisiting the Kingdom Series: Subtraction Interventions in Landscape Art—minimalist conceptual art practices from Norway 2015 to Serbia 2016, exploring situated knowledge, material politics, and urban dramaturgy through bodily gestures like arm-reach clearings of leaves, ivy, and soil. Rooted in operative thinking and infrastructural vision, these ephemeral installations challenge anthropocentric hierarchies, drawing on Haraway and Bratton for distributed agency in ecological drifts amid climate precarity. From Madrid 2026, this serial practice reclaims tactile engagements in post-natural spaces, fostering mobile methodologies and design research for future curatorial methods.

Full essay * https://antolloveras.blogspot.com/2026/01/kingdom-series-subtractions-as.html