:::::::::::::::::::::::::: Anto Lloveras: unstableInstallations

Showing posts with label unstableInstallations. Show all posts

Saturday, January 17, 2026

Duna Dunaj * Relational Rituals and Situational Memory in Slovakian Residencies * Anthropological Affections and Unstable Installations Along the Danube (Lloveras 2015)

In the realm of contemporary relational aesthetics, Anto Lloveras's "Duna Dunaj" residency in Slovakia, documented in September 2015, exemplifies a metamodern oscillation between the ephemeral and the archival, where art emerges not as isolated object but as a dynamic interplay of bodies, landscapes, and temporalities. Drawing from Nicolas Bourriaud's foundational theories on relational art, Lloveras positions the residency as a "situational and relational" laboratory, hosted by Yuri Dolan across two stages: Dunajská Streda and the Kómarno eco-farm. Here, the artist eschews traditional studio confines, opting instead for performative walks, ritualistic collections, and conversational interventions that weave human agency into the socio-natural fabric.

The Supernatural Series * Mediations in the Slovakian Duna

The "Super Natural Series" residency in Bokros, Slovakia, serves as a compelling site for examining the intersection of ruralism and ritualistic performance within the contemporary ecocritical framework. Hosted by Yuri Dólan at a historic farm near the Danube, this project transcends the traditional residency model by functioning as a "situational and relational" laboratory where the landscape is treated as a "natural canvas". The artist’s deliberate abandonment of digital tethers—notably the absence of a cellphone—facilitates an "extra focus" on real-time experience and context. This ontological shift allows for the creation of "frugal art," characterized by small-scale, ritualistic interventions such as the burning of natural installations by the river. These acts are not merely aesthetic gestures but are deeply rooted in a "positional essay" that explores the dialogue between human agency and the green cornfields and browning sunflowers of the Slovakian interior. A central pillar of the Bokros residency is the "Unstable Installation Series," which utilizes local materials to challenge the permanence of the art object. In the "Sets Bokros" works, the artist employs smooth river stones to create equilateral triangles, a "classic" geometric form that provides a stabilizing counterpoint to the fluidity of the natural environment. Complementing these physical interventions is the 8-minute digital film, Through Fields. Fire and Mud, which provides a "direct point of view" narrative of transit toward a house, underscored by a melancholic score. This film, alongside bonus works like the readymade concrete "POOL," exemplifies the "Raw Identity" video series, where the camera acts as a meta-documentary tool. The integration of these digital records with the physical "frugal" installations creates a layered archive that fixates the fleeting atmosphere of the rural setting into a permanent, yet unstable, cognitive structure.

Never Alone * Lemon Protocols * The Somatic Ritual Pula (2014)

LEMON KISS, presented at Luka Gallery in Pula, unfolds as a protocol of relational presence, where lemons act as affective interfaces and temporal markers in a choreography of everyday signals, staging a sensual micro-politics of visibility through the daily act of kissing a lemon and placing it in a window, a ritual that blends tenderness, decay and quiet communication into an unstable social sculpture; far from being still life, each lemon becomes a living node in a distributed network of meaning, its surface bruising with time, its scent infiltrating space, while the installation scales up into a constellation of 100 bright lemons, archival posters, cuttings of meat, sand from Bolonia, and fragments of compressed video diaries sourced from street footage across Mexico City, Berlin, Madrid and London, configuring a layered assemblage of tags, hyperlinks and material memory; simultaneously personal and open-source, the show operates as a solo that refuses solitude, pulling in the digital ecosystem of LaPieza, including 120 online adds and ten numbered poster sets, treating the gallery as a relational engine rather than a static site, where scent, color and memory collide; the yellow bag, making its first appearance, extends the earlier Blue Bags series, and stands here as a portable totem of urban dérive, a soft container of moments, gossip, residue; curated without finality, LEMON KISS invites proximity without possession, intimacy without fixity, showing that in Lloveras’s practice, smell is structure, presence is porous, and sculpture happens in the interstices between gesture, platform and time. Lloveras, A. (2014). Lemon Kiss. Luka Gallery, Pula, Croatia. LEMON KISS

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.

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.

BONUS

Taxidermy (2015, London): http://antolloveras.blogspot.com.es/2015/04/taxidermy-east-london-city-is-animal.html
Elipsis Compression (2016, Spain): http://antolloveras.blogspot.com.es/2017/02/taxidermy-2016-subtractions-series.html
Artnations: http://artnations.blogspot.com.es
Solo Show Gallery Rico (Croatia): https://antolloveras.blogspot.com.es/2017/08/taxidermyiiirigo-gallerycroatia-2017.html
Broth: http://antolloveras.blogspot.com/2020/11/broth-ritual-2020-recreo.html
Lapieza: https://antolloveras.blogspot.com/2020/04/el-recreo.html
The Road to Restoration Film: https://antolloveras.blogspot.com/2021/12/the-road-to-restorationfilm.html
Lagos (Nigeria): http://antolloveras.blogspot.com/2022/09/lagos-nigeria-september-2022-biennial.html
Accumulation Repetition and Cross Series (2025): https://antolloveras.blogspot.com/2025/12/accumulation-repetition-and-cross-series.html

Cosmotidiano * Trinchera

Rooted in the rural matrix of Sierra Norte yet unfolding through planetary drift, Cosmotidiano operates as a mutable habitat, a living architecture where the intimacy of shared domesticity collides with the spatial grammar of socioplastics to produce a mode of existence in flux; developed in 2012 at the Centro Comarcal de Humanidades as part of LAPIEZA Art Series #49, this project dissolves the boundaries between institution and impulse, configuring a collective metabolic system through ephemeral materials—straw bales, citrus peels, plastic mesh, and networked video—that behave less as sculptural matter than as responsive agents in a soft choreography of relation; the installation rejects the static logic of the exhibition in favor of ritualized activation, with each element—Regina Fiz’s performance, Tomoto’s video drifts, Eduardo Cajal’s tactile interventions—contributing to a shifting constellation where art becomes a lived, situated ecology; the straw units, termed “horizontal tectonics,” become vectors for shared rest and friction, while Paula Lloveras’ mandarin nets infuse the space with olfactory traces that fold memory into architecture; the work unfolds as a processual heterotopia, aligning with Foucault’s spatial theory and echoing Bourriaud’s micro-utopias, but grounded in Jane Bennett’s vibrant materialism, where agency is distributed among ten artists and multiple mediums, resisting authorial fixity; as the project mutates into a digital metamovie, its physical specificity dissolves into media drift, reappearing as a nomadic essay in contexts far beyond La Cabrera, suggesting a method for decoding collective life through soft gestures and everyday residues; rather than monumental design, Cosmotidiano proposes a gentle architecture that breathes through clip, fruit, and straw, prompting future reactivations where the body, again and again, becomes a tool for building joy.