Socioplastics and Transdisciplinary Drift * LAPIEZA as a Relational Infrastructure for Decolonial Contemporary Practice


LAPIEZA ART SERIES, initiated by Anto Lloveras in Madrid in 2009, can be understood as one of the most coherent attempts to translate post-relational aesthetics into a durable, transdisciplinary cultural infrastructure. Conceived under the conceptual banner of Socioplastics, the project departs from Nicolas Bourriaud’s relational paradigm while simultaneously exposing its limitations: where relational aesthetics often stabilised into convivial micro-events sanctioned by institutional frames, LAPIEZA radicalises relation as a long-term, accumulative, and epistemically productive condition. From its inception, the project positions itself against the closure of canonical exhibition formats and the inertia of institutional legitimation. It replaces the autonomous artwork with a serial, unstable, and collectively authored meta-form, in which each contribution functions as a semiotic node within an expanding field of meaning. The platform’s early emphasis on urban interventions and neighbourhood-scale ecologies in Madrid already signals a refusal of the white cube as the privileged site of art. Instead, LAPIEZA performs what might be termed a civic aesthetics: art as a walkable, inhabitable, and socially embedded practice. This civic turn, later theorised through notions such as Shaded, Collective, and Walkable Landscapes, reframes urbanism itself as a socioplastic medium. The city becomes not merely a context but a material with which relational form is composed. In this sense, LAPIEZA operates less as an art project than as a proto-institution: a mutable architecture of relations, capable of absorbing heterogeneity while maintaining internal coherence through seriality, documentation, and shared protocols.


As the project evolves beyond its Madrid origins, its conceptual grammar expands into what can be described as a topolexical mapping of contemporary practice. Terms such as Minimal, Porous, and Open to the World and Crossing Ecology, Anthropology, and Space do not function as thematic slogans but as operational coordinates within a distributed epistemic field. Here, architecture is no longer a discipline of enclosure but a porous interface for global dialogues; ecology ceases to be a metaphor and becomes a methodological horizon; anthropology is mobilised not as ethnographic distance but as situated, reflexive co-presence. This triangulation situates LAPIEZA within a broader post-humanist and decolonial discourse, in which knowledge production is inseparable from spatial practice and relational ethics. The platform’s insistence on mobility, translation, and interoceanic production—most visibly in its Madrid–Mexico City axis—further consolidates this shift. LAPIEZA does not export a model; it mutates through contact. Each geographical displacement produces new semiotic densities and affective textures, embedding local histories, material cultures, and political frictions into the socioplastic matrix. In theoretical terms, the project realises a post-site condition akin to Miwon Kwon’s discursive site, yet extended through serial accumulation and networked dissemination. Place becomes relational, provisional, and multiply authored. The artwork is no longer situated in space; it is constituted by spatial relations.

This relational constitution acquires explicit pedagogical force through the platform’s commitment to radical teaching practices articulated in Workshops, Studios, and Radical Pedagogy. Here, LAPIEZA performs a decisive epistemic inversion: education is no longer an ancillary function of artistic production but one of its primary media. Workshops and studios become socioplastic devices for co-learning, where artists, students, and publics collectively negotiate forms of knowledge that exceed disciplinary silos. Teaching is reconfigured as an aesthetic act, and aesthetics as a pedagogical process. This fusion resonates with Paulo Freire’s critical pedagogy and with contemporary debates on decolonising the curriculum, yet it remains grounded in concrete practices of making, walking, writing, and assembling. The notion that Writing Becomes Spatial crystallises this pedagogical turn. Essays are no longer confined to the page but unfold as performative, installative, and archival gestures. Text becomes a spatial event, an embodied itinerary through ideas, objects, and encounters. In this configuration, authorship is irreversibly destabilised. Knowledge is produced not by sovereign individuals but through what LAPIEZA terms Shared Authorship as Epistemic Strategy. This strategy does not dilute responsibility; it redistributes it. Meaning emerges through negotiated relations, and theory itself becomes a collective artefact. The platform thus articulates a rare synthesis between practice-based research and relational aesthetics, in which epistemology is not an abstract discourse but a lived, spatialised, and affective process.

The culmination of this transdisciplinary drift is visible in LAPIEZA’s expanded engagement with exhibitions, films, and archives, articulated through nodes such as Biennials, Triennials, and Museums and Essay, Performance, and the Archive. These engagements do not signal a return to institutional dependency but a tactical occupation of institutional space. LAPIEZA enters museums and biennials as a counter-institutional parasite, inserting socioplastic logics into contexts structured by spectacle and commodification. Installations, performances, and objects within this framework do not aspire to permanence; they embody what might be called unstable agencies. Each work is a temporary crystallisation of relational energy, destined to be reabsorbed into the larger archive of the platform. Filmic and essayistic practices extend this archive into deep time, generating a memory apparatus that resists entropy by continuously reactivating past materials through new relational frames. Anto Lloveras’s nomadic, transdisciplinary lens—rooted in Madrid’s urban flux and informed by anthropology, ecology, and film—functions here not as a unifying style but as an infrastructural sensibility. It binds heterogeneous practices into a coherent ethical and epistemic horizon. In this horizon, narrative autonomy is reclaimed from institutional and market-driven scripts, and art is reimagined as a sovereign relational infrastructure. LAPIEZA thus stands as a singular contemporary experiment in how art might operate as a living ecology of practices, capable of resisting both conceptual exhaustion and institutional capture through continuous socioplastic recomposition (LAPIEZA, 2009–2013).





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