MUDAS * From Leaf to Scent * Ephemeral installations using single leaves to stage decay, scent, and transformation as socioplastic processes linking ritual materiality with urban temporality.

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.

Supernatural Series * Ritual Metabolism

The Supernatural Series (2013–ongoing) constitutes the metabolic axis of Anto Lloveras’s Socioplastics, wherein art relinquishes static objecthood to assume the condition of a living, consumable cycle. Conceived as an operative cosmology rather than a discrete corpus, it mobilises wild botany, oxidation, scent, and alimentary ritual under the governing maxim “No Leftovers”—a sequential liturgy of Take → Display → Picture → Cook → Eat → Post. Here, the so-called supernatural is neither mystic residue nor transcendental excess; it is the intensification of the ordinary through sustained relational attention, rendering nourishment itself an epistemic act. Early manifestations in MUDAS established the olfactory grammar of controlled decay: banana and maize leaves pinned to humid walls exhaled metallic-sweet vapours as they curled, instituting scent as architectural duration. Parallel Mediterranean inflections emerged in Lemon Kiss, where one hundred kissed lemons oxidised into a citrus cloud, publicising the intimate protocols of affection and perishability. Subsequent reframings, notably Ephemeral Rituals and the Supernatural Wall (Cádiz, 2026), condensed twelve wild tagarninas into arm-reach circles against whitewashed façades, suturing rural rice fields to urban stone while consummating the ritual through ingestion. Across these iterations, the Relational Body becomes infrastructural conduit, and Decay-as-Clock supersedes preservationist museology. The series ultimately posits a postdigital ontology in which memory is not archived but metabolised: art persists not by resisting entropy, but by traversing the body and re-entering the mesh as affective density.

Cosmotidiano * Mutable collectives and planetary intimacy * SOCIOPLASTICS

Cosmotidiano is a socioplastic installation and living process conceived by Anto Lloveras, first activated at the Centro Comarcal de Humanidades Sierra Norte in 2012 as LAPIEZA Exhibition #49. Positioned between domestic architecture, ephemeral art, and mutable collectivity, the work operates as a shared habitat in continual flux—part shelter, part relational sculpture—where daily gestures become planetary rituals. Built collaboratively by Eduardo Cajal, Regina Fiz, Tomoto, and Hectruso, El Intruso, among others, the installation unfolds through layered acts of spatial reconfiguration: hay bales, citrus peels, light, plastic mesh, and shadows form a fluctuating scenography that embraces permeability, process, and co-presence. Cosmotidiano rejects the binary of private versus public, proposing instead a transitory ecology of being-with—an intimate infrastructure where the quotidian expands into cosmopolitical territory. The work exemplifies socioplastics at its most immersive: the collective not as static form, but as situational tissue that binds materials, bodies, and atmospheres into a lived topology of care. As a "United Nations of Art" in miniature, Cosmotidiano is not just an exhibition but a test site for new social anatomies, where the home becomes a portal to the planetary, and matter speaks in soft loops of transformation. 

Ephemeral Encounters and Enduring Resonance: How UJ’s 2026 Arts & Culture Programme Reimagines Temporality and Collective Experience in the Arts

Framed under the theme Ephemeral, the 2026 UJ Arts & Culture Programme emerges as a sensorial palimpsest where performance, visual art, and participatory encounters collide to articulate the fragile beauty of the momentary, aligning with the University of Johannesburg’s commitment to Pan-African excellence, social impact, and creative innovation, this year’s offering presents a curatorial ethos that privileges presence over permanence, creating an aesthetic of transience that resists commodification and instead foregrounds shared, embodied experience, the season unfolds as a dynamic procession of events—from Gregory Maqoma’s diasporic choreography and Bev Butkow’s suspended installations, to the inaugural ARAK Fellowship and risk-aware student theatre by Jade Bowers—that reveal how art dissolves borders while amplifying dialogue, these temporal interventions act as catalysts for reflection: whether in the haunting reverberations of Jeanne Zaidel-Rudolph’s Human Rights Oratorio, the spatial poetics of Chronogram, or the spiritual jazz-inflected chants of ESINAM and Sibusile Xaba, each component of the programme enacts ephemerality not as disappearance, but as an imprint, a spectral architecture of thought and feeling that persists beyond the artwork’s physicality, one emblematic case is The Bacchae: An African Choral Ballet, a bold synthesis of classical myth, African cosmology, and choral choreography that exemplifies how transient events can generate sustained transformation across artistic and cultural registers, directed by Jay Pather and scored by Neo Muyanga, the production confronts the viewer with the porous threshold between tradition and experiment, conclusionally, UJ’s 2026 initiative doesn’t merely programme events—it curates moments that matter, asking audiences to embrace the liminality of live art as a generative force, shaping the social imaginary long after lights dim and spaces empty, and in doing so, the institution reinforces its role as a cultural conduit, where temporary works ignite enduring resonance.

MUDAS:::::::::::::::::::::::::SERIES MUDAS_______001:::::017_______OXIDACIÓN PLÁSTICO AROMÁTICA...................UNSTABLE SOCIAL INSTALLATION__________________MEXICO DF 2013_____________________________LAPIEZA

MUDAS

Bodies, Leaves and Decay

The MUDAS series, presented in Mexico City in 2013, articulates a poetics of transience through banana leaves arranged as anthropomorphic forms. Their folds, wrinkles, and oxidations suggest vulnerable bodies suspended between life and disappearance. Each piece becomes both a vegetal relic and a human echo, oscillating between sculpture and ephemeral installation. The work proposes a radical ecology of perception, where organic material and social body mirror each other, blurring the limits of art, ritual and decay. Installed in LaPieza and the Hotel Virreyes showroom, the series engages the public in a relational encounter: the leaves, placed on white walls, face the visitors, forcing a silent dialogue on mortality, transformation and the unstable nature of matter. By naming them social sculptures, the artist emphasises the community dimension of the act—each spectator becomes co-participant, completing the fragile presence of these vegetal bodies with their own gaze. MUDAS is thus not only about leaves but about the impermanence of form itself: a reminder that every body, human or vegetal, carries within it the inevitability of change.

SHOWROOM VIRREYES - MEXICO DF 2013

INSTALACIÓN

ESCULTURA SOCIOPLÁSTICA

ART BY ANTO LLOVERAS

MEXICO DF 2013