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 Socioplastics therefore proposes a rigorous shift within contemporary practice: the artwork no longer represents ideas but constitutes a load-bearing epistemic system, capable of sustaining meaning within increasingly volatile informational environments.

Palimpsest of living tissue

At the heart of Socioplastics lies a radical reconceptualization of architecture and cultural practice as metabolic epistemic infrastructure—a unified field that dissolves disciplinary boundaries and treats knowledge as built environment and governance. Rooted in Anto Lloveras’s sustained practice since the late-2000s, the framework reframes cultural production not as static representation but as dynamic ingestion, transformation, and redistribution of informational matter. Socioplastics operates through a mesh logic of nodes functioning both as archives and engines of meaning, where authorship shifts toward infrastructural calibration and semantic flow governance. Architectural thought becomes operative syntax; theory ceases to be commentary and becomes spatial strategy; curation is recoded into epistemic governance. The metabolic organism principle at its core metabolizes prior intellectual inheritances—urban metabolism, media archaeology, systems theory—into a resilient lattice of procedural density capable of enduring post-digital volatility. 

Metabolic Lineages

Anto Lloveras's practice — rooted in Socioplastics, relational art, unstable social sculpture, metabolic architecture, durational interventions, and epistemic infrastructure — draws heavily from Joseph Beuys's social sculpture (art as societal shaping and relational process) and Nicolas Bourriaud's relational aesthetics (art as social encounter and micro-utopias). His work emphasizes nomadic, low-material gestures, vernacular readymades, situational fixers, and sovereign metabolic systems in unstable times, blending conceptual urbanism, performance, curatorial platforms (like LAPIEZA), and post-digital archiving. Few exact matches exist due to his highly singular, hyperdense mesh (over 300 projects, self-referential canon), but here are the most comparable contemporary or influential artists/practitioners. Ranked by conceptual proximity (strongest first), based on shared logics of relational instability, social metabolism, light/everyday materials, durational activation, and critique of institutional/commodified art.