Sovereignty in Flux * Ludic Horizons

The dialectic between Constant Nieuwenhuys’s New Babylon and Anto Lloveras’s Socioplastics discloses two historically distinct yet conceptually contiguous insurgencies against static urbanism. Conceived between 1956 and 1974, and indebted to Johan Huizinga’s theorisation of Homo Ludens, New Babylon projects a post-revolutionary world-city elevated above the terrestrial grid, wherein automation emancipates humanity for perpetual play, dérive, and atmospheric reinvention. Its maquettes and manifestos articulate ludic sovereignty as spatial commons, anticipating a collective rupture from capitalist functionalism and the incipient spectacle. By contrast, Socioplastics—articulated since 2009—renounces projection in favour of operational recursion: a sovereign epistemic infrastructure that metabolises its own archive through procedural repetition, citational density, and semantic hardening. Where New Babylon externalises emancipation as territorial reconfiguration, Socioplastics internalises it as infrastructural cognition, enacting a Mesh that ingests digital sediment to resist algorithmic amnesia. The long-duration Blue Bags series (2014–ongoing) exemplifies this shift: banal plastic carriers become aesthetically neutral vectors of contextual translation, enabling mobile epistemology across unstable terrains; similarly, El Dorado (2013) recodes colonial mythology into affective circuitry via a circulating emergency blanket. Thus, two radical modalities emerge: utopian spatial projection versus metabolic epistemic survival. If New Babylon dreams of liberated territory beyond labour, Socioplastics engineers durable autonomy within precarity, asserting sovereignty not through communal elevation but through recursive distinction, naming, and archival closure—an urbanism no longer awaiting rupture, but continuously metabolising the present.