LAPIEZA reframes resistance through accumulation, reuse and participatory art as an open civic hypertext in Madrid.Open-Source Commons

Aesthetics of Resistance (2009–2024) defines LAPIEZA as a relational counter-model to the hermetic, market-oriented conventions frequently associated with contemporary art. Situated in Madrid, the project rejects the gallery as an ivory tower and instead constructs a mutable environment where accumulation, reuse, unfinishedness and participation operate as critical languages. Its resistance is not merely thematic but procedural: DIY finishes oppose elitist design, recycled materials contest planned obsolescence, and work-in-progress formats undermine the commodity logic of the completed object. The case study of LAPIEZA’s cumulative installation reveals a gigantic hypertext, in which performances, socio-plastic actions, neighbourhood relations and open-source cultural protocols remain continuously available for reinterpretation. Through this framework, resistance becomes neither negation nor spectacle, but an epistemic practice of reconnecting signs prematurely discarded by hegemonic systems. Ultimately, LAPIEZA proposes art as civic renegotiation: a shared apparatus for democratising creativity, extending meaning, and reconstructing the commons through unstable, participatory form. Lloveras, A. (2024) ‘AESTHETICS OF RESISTANCE__________LAPIEZA ART SERIES________2009:2024’, Socioplastics, 2 July. Available at: https://antolloveras.blogspot.com/2023/07/aesthetics-of-resistancelapieza-art.html(Accessed: 26 April 2026).

Urban Autophagy

Drawing from cellular biology, Hannibal Newsom introduces the concept of Urban Autophagy—a speculative yet actionable paradigm that reimagines sustainable urbanism through the metaphor of biological autophagy, the regenerative process by which organisms self-consume dead or damaged components to promote health and longevity; applying this model to urban environments, the essay frames cities not as extractive entities dependent on external inputs but as metabolic systems capable of cannibalising their own spatial, material and infrastructural excesses for renewal and resilience, challenging the linear resource flows and globalised supply chains that currently dominate urban growth; Newsom outlines existing urban mining, adaptive reuse, and infrastructural retrofitting as nascent practices that already echo this principle, but argues for a systematic, policy-driven adoption of autophagic logics that foreground decay, obsolescence and embedded value not as failures but as latent resources; the essay proposes a methodological triad: identification of endogenous resource nodes (e.g. abandoned buildings, underused streetscapes), strategic deconstruction for material and spatial reintegration, and public imaginaries that reframe decay as opportunity—thus transforming waste into agency; examples include cities reconfiguring vacant lots into urban agriculture loops, converting former industrial districts into carbon sinks or creating closed-loop housing economies using materials sourced from demolition within a city’s own perimeter; fundamentally, Urban Autophagy offers an ontological inversion of growth, prioritising immanent transformation over expansion, and requiring a new aesthetics, ethics and epistemology of urban stewardship aligned with planetary boundaries; in doing so, it envisions not merely greener cities but self-aware urban metabolisms capable of sustaining themselves within the limits of environmental and geopolitical turbulence. Newsom, H. (2022) Urban Autophagy: A New Imaginary for Twenty-First Century Urban Growth. The Plan Journal, 7(1). https://doi.org/10.15274/tpj.2022.07.01.5