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.
Architectures of Friction and Fabric: From Urban Meshes to Sovereign Pedagogies – A career woven through metabolised cities and relational geometries
From the interstitial zones of Madrid's Mirador Building to the post-autonomous installations of the Lagos Biennial, the praxis of Anto Lloveras unfolds as a cartography of spatial entanglement where urban metabolism, systemic architecture, and relational art collide in deliberate disorder; his trajectory, inscribed within projects like LAPIEZA and Socioplastics, proposes a mesh-based methodology that reconfigures both disciplinary borders and epistemic sovereignty, crafting platforms-as-ecologies that oscillate between spatial research, curatorial interventions, and pedagogical dissent, thus rendering the architect not a constructor but a mediator of post-disciplinary tensions, his work in RE-(T)eXhile during the 2024 Lagos Biennial confronting the violent excess of global textile waste through site-specific artistic remediation in partnership with informal economies and decaying infrastructures, embodying what he terms textile metabolism—a conceptual weave where refugia, material cycles, and civic visibility intersect; this becomes evident in the Biennial's collaborative mappings and installations responding to West Africa’s dumping corridors, reframing debris as mnemonic artefacts of colonial-industrial legacy; beyond such interventions, Lloveras's post-history research with UAM and his residency iterations through Nomad AIR mark his commitment to a mobile yet grounded epistemology, where authority is dispersed across meshworks of knowledge rather than centralised institutions; early projects like 11 Plazas or the Manzana Verde plan in Málaga show how sustainable urbanism and contested public space formed his foundational vocabulary, later complexified through engagements with Relational Aesthetics in Mexico, Croatia, and Spain as archived in Replicante and Kulturistra, which underscore his concern with affective infrastructure; today, his conceptualisation of Future Utopia as both pedagogical platform and speculative tool exemplifies a shift from object-based production to ecosystemic thinking, where pedagogy, art, and architecture no longer serve domains but activate each other in transversal flows of co-creation and disruption. Lagos Biennial 2024, RE-(T)eXhile, https://lagos-biennial.org/lb-2024/2024-participants/