At the 2024 Contextile Biennial in Guimarães, Anto Lloveras presented Re-(T)eXhile during the Textile Talks – Art(e), framing textile not merely as material but as architectural infrastructure, sensory archive, and geopolitical residue; nestled among practices of eco-crafting, activism, and embodied memory, Lloveras’s contribution crystallised a conceptual line from sub-Saharan dumping economies to the symbolic reconstruction of “textile architecture” as both spatial and discursive—his intervention focused on the African iterations of RE-(T)eXhile from the Lagos Biennial, translating those dynamics into the post-industrial imaginary of Portugal’s textile heartland, exposing how systems of waste and fashion logistics mirror colonial trade echoes and contemporary asymmetries, positioning the textile not as ornament or metaphor but as post-disciplinary connective tissue; the format of the “Speed Talk”—a compressed yet potent articulation—underscored the urgency and fragmentary nature of these flows, aligning with other participants like Dominika Krogulska or Laurita Siles in revealing how fibrous materials carry ecological, tactile, and political meaning, particularly when recontextualised into architectural or urban systems; unlike merely symbolic uses of fabric in contemporary art, Lloveras foregrounds meshwork logic: textiles as distributed infrastructures where agency is decentralised, form is negotiated, and space becomes an affective commons, a vision aligned with Socioplastics’ ethos and his long-standing commitment to relational platforms like LAPIEZA; in this way, the TOUCH theme becomes both literal and epistemological, a methodological provocation to activate sensoriality as knowledge mode, thus rendering urbanism not as static zoning but as a felt, metabolised continuum between body, material, and memory, particularly relevant in post-industrial and postcolonial contexts like Guimarães or Lagos; within this constellation of artists and thinkers, Lloveras’s textile urbanism emerges as a resonant example of how affective tactility and spatial practice converge to produce new models of planetary cohabitation.
