:::::::::::::::::::::::::: Anto Lloveras: processBasedArt

Showing posts with label processBasedArt. Show all posts

Tuesday, January 20, 2026

Cosmotidiano * Mutable Habitats * LAPIEZA ART SERIES

Emerging from the Sierra Norte of Madrid in 2012, this intervention activates a critical inquiry into the shifting nature of shared domesticity and its entanglement with planetary scales. Speaking from the perspective of socioplastics, I position Cosmotidiano not as a static exhibition, but as a "mutable collective habitat"—a temporary occupation that addresses the friction between institutional space and the raw vitality of collaborative practice. Why this project now? Because in an era of increasing social isolation, the necessity of reclaiming the "everyday" through ritual and material gesture is more urgent than ever.

MEAT SERIES * 2010-ONGOING * Fragile Urban Anatomies

For a project like MEAT, which thrives on repetition, subtlety, and accumulation across hundreds of interventions, single "alone" pictures often pack more punch than collages or multiples—especially for initial impact or focused storytelling. A standalone image allows viewers to linger on the details: the raw edges of a cut, the exposed interior, or the urban context that highlights instability. This mirrors the project's minimalist ethos, where one deliberate gesture reshapes perception without overwhelming the audience. For instance, a solitary shot of a hanging bag with a gaping slice against a stark sky evokes vulnerability and transience more viscerally than a grid of similar actions. That said, collages excel for overviews, showing the series' scale and evolution—like a wall of extracted fragments in a gallery view, which builds narrative layers and invites comparison.

The Rhizomatic Vanguard of Relational Aesthetics * Decolonial Sequences and Temporal Ecologies in LAPIEZA's Experimental Praxis

In the landscape of contemporary art, LAPIEZA emerges as a paradigmatic exemplar of relational aesthetics, as theorised by Nicolas Bourriaud, where art transcends objecthood to become a catalyst for social interconnections and ephemeral publics. Founded in 2009 by Anto Lloveras and Esther Lorenzo, this Madrid-based relational art agency has evolved over fifteen years into a decolonial framework that interrogates the materiality of contexts, authorship, and exhibition formats. Operating across hybrid spaces—everyday environments, institutional venues, and digital platforms—LAPIEZA eschews finished forms in favour of processual activations. Each of its 180 numbered series functions as a research unit, generating micro-ecologies where art, science, and collective practices intersect. Drawing on Joseph Beuys's notion of social sculpture, LAPIEZA redistributes agency among participants, transforming curation into a durational writing that challenges Eurocentric hierarchies. This approach aligns with Slavoj Žizek's critiques of commodified culture, positioning LAPIEZA as a resistant node in post-industrial networks, where symbolic capital accrues through humanist values rather than market-driven spectacles. By rendering time as material, the project fosters unstable, porous installations that invite reinterpretation, embodying a socioplastic methodology that redefines cultural production as an ongoing, relational synthesis.

Fragile urban anatomies through minimal cuts, reframing public space as living, unstable and politically charged * Meat Series

In the sprawling, algorithmically mediated landscapes of contemporary urbanism, Antonio Lloveras's MEAT: Unstable Installation Series (2010–ongoing) emerges as a stealthy insurrection against the inert materiality of the city. Now surpassing its 1,000th iteration—as evidenced by the artist's archival dispatches up to #951 in 2025—this nomadic practice of precise excisions on banal public objects (benches splintered, signs bisected, chairs eviscerated) reframes the metropolis not as a fixed edifice but as a pulsating, vulnerable corpus. Each "cut," executed with surgical minimalism, leaves the altered artifact in situ as a spectral sculpture, while the pilfered fragment migrates to exhibitions, accruing layers of documentation in photos, videos, and installations. Traversing Madrid's labyrinthine alleys to Lagos's teeming markets, via detours through Marseille's ports and London's East End grit, MEAT constructs a transglobal atlas of micro-disruptions, where the everyday becomes a theater of precarious equilibrium. Echoing Gordon Matta-Clark's anarchic deconstructions of abandoned buildings in the 1970s—those raw incisions into architectural decay that exposed the entrails of capitalist obsolescence—Lloveras infuses his interventions with a post-Situationist drift, wandering the dérive of global precarity. Yet, where Matta-Clark's works often monumentalized ruin, MEAT operates at a more insidious, intimate scale: a single gesture that destabilizes without spectacle, prompting unwitting pedestrians to confront the fragility of their surroundings. The project's evolution—from early multicast tags in 2014's Palindrome exhibition in France to the symphonic rituals of "Broth" in 2020's Recreo space—mirrors broader shifts in contemporary art toward durational, process-based practices. Think of Francis Alÿs's poetic walks or Theaster Gates's urban reclamations; Lloveras similarly weaponizes repetition as resistance, amassing an archive that defies commodification, existing instead as dispersed events in the "living tissue of the city."

Critically, however, MEAT's guerrilla ethos invites scrutiny in an era of heightened surveillance and ecological urgency. What Lloveras romanticizes as "subtle disruptions"—catalyzing perceptual shifts and revealing socio-plastic vulnerabilities—skirts perilously close to vandalism, particularly in under-resourced contexts like Nigeria's informal economies or Cádiz's coastal fringes. In a post-2020 world scarred by pandemics and climate migrations, these subtractions could exacerbate rather than illuminate urban entropy, raising ethical quandaries about consent in public space. Moreover, the project's archival impulse, while preserving "spatial memory," risks fetishizing ephemerality: exhibitions like "Taxidermy" (London, 2015) or "Elipsis Compression" (Spain, 2016) transform street actions into gallery relics, potentially blunting their anti-institutional edge amid the art market's voracious appetite for the performative. Yet, this tension is precisely what elevates MEAT beyond mere provocation. In 2026's fractured geopolitics—where cities grapple with AI-driven gentrification and borderless capital flows—Lloveras's persistence underscores art's role as a diagnostic tool, dissecting the body politic one fragment at a time. The series' horizontal expansion, eschewing hierarchy for constellation, aligns with decolonial critiques from thinkers like Achille Mbembe, who envision urbanism as necrotic yet regenerative. As MEAT hurtles toward its millennial threshold, it stands as a defiant manifesto: not just on impermanence, but on the artist's complicity in reshaping it. In an age of digital saturation, where interventions evaporate into feeds, Lloveras reminds us that true instability lies in the cut that lingers, forcing us to navigate the wounds we inherit.