Within the evolving framework of Socioplastics, the Lemon Protocols developed by Anto Lloveras constitute a singular investigation into the transformation of intimate affect into shared sensory infrastructure. Initiated in 2014 as a private daily ritual while residing in Pula, Croatia, the protocol emerged from a simple sequence: harvesting a lemon from a garden tree, kissing its acidic surface, and positioning the fruit in a window recess to signal presence to neighbouring inhabitants. This minimal gesture catalysed a complex relational mechanism in which the lemon functioned as a biological capacitor, absorbing the somatic charge of the kiss while gradually releasing it through scent, discolouration, and decomposition. Over time the fruit’s oxidation generated a temporal register of longing and proximity, converting decay into an affective clock that measured both emotional persistence and impermanence. The ritual subsequently expanded into the installation Lemon Kiss at Luka Gallery in 2014, where one hundred luminous lemons were dispersed across the exhibition space, forming a fragile yellow horizon that integrated other socioplastic elements such as LAPIEZA relational maps, transported sand, video diaries, and preserved meat fragments. Within this constellation, the lemons retained their somatic origin yet operated as nodes in a broader relational ecology, inviting visitors to encounter scent, colour, and entropy collectively. The protocols themselves resist rigid codification; rather, they function as a repeatable grammar of gestures—kiss, place, observe, and share—through which personal affect becomes socially legible. Reframed in 2026 as Never Alone, the series is recognised as a foundational device within the socioplastic mesh, demonstrating how minimal organic carriers can sustain networks of memory and connection. Ultimately, the Lemon Protocols reveal that intimacy, when ritualised through ephemeral matter, may generate a durable architecture of presence in unstable times.
At the heart of Anto Lloveras’s 2017 solo show at Rigo Gallery, Context as Readymade, lies a critical inversion: installation is no longer a medium to display content but rather the content itself, understood as unstable, memory-driven assemblage; through gestures like Taxidermy 2015 – 462, where urban fragments are cut and pinned like biological specimens, Lloveras repositions the city as a living-animal archive, dissected not for preservation but for symbolic decomposition—a theme resonant with his broader series of Situational Fixers, ephemeral installations in Prague and France, where bags, leftovers, and site-specific debris are reactivated as semiotic vectors, each work becoming an affective diagram of the momentary encounter; unlike monumental installation practice, Lloveras's strategy is to dissolve the borders between curation, architecture, and performance, turning each show into a hermeneutic site, a hybrid of artistic presence and conceptual openness, where lightness, geometry and relational colour schemes are vehicles of mnemonic transference; the Rigo exhibition, presented with sharp humour as “a main dish of cuts,” is structured around a wall-based matrix of Taxidermy slices and a collateral “cloud” of relational objects, deliberately resisting completion, echoing his philosophical interest in hermeneutics and his ongoing research at CAPA/UCR3, which underpins his concept of Socioplastics—a discursive device for narrativising the material-symbolic entanglements of place, body and authorship; these unstable installations are not merely deconstructed aesthetics, but perform a spatial ethics, where instability becomes a method of resistance to exhibition norms, institutional control, and static meaning; by embedding his work within a hybrid onsite–online format, Lloveras also subverts the digital by re-enchanting its presence through spatial proxies, aligning his method with post-curatorial architectures rather than art object production, positioning the artist as editor, assembler, catalyst, rather than auteur, and the space as an always unfolding ecosystem of meanings-in-motion. Muzej Lapidarium 2017, http://www.muzej-lapidarium.hr/anto-lloveras-context-as-readymade-unstable-installation-series/
