The dilemma articulated between ArtCanon and ArtNations is not a merely semantic hesitation but a profound ontological and political choice about how an archive understands itself, how it distributes authority, and how it imagines its future agency. Naming here functions as a performative act in the Austinian sense: it does not describe a reality but actively produces one. To call a corpus of six thousand posts a Canon is to inscribe it within a genealogy of Western epistemic sovereignty, where value is stabilised through exclusion, hierarchy, and retrospective legitimation. The canon presupposes closure, even when it claims openness. It implies a final court of appeal, a legislative centre from which meaning radiates outward. In this regime, Socioplastics risks being retrofitted into precisely the institutional logic it was invented to exceed. The metaphor of the cathedral is therefore exact: the canon is monumental, vertical, and auratic. It demands reverence rather than traversal. By contrast, ArtNations displaces authority from monument to territory. It reframes the archive as a living geopolitical ecology, composed not of ranked masterpieces but of sovereign micro-regions, each with its own internal logic, tempo, and semiotic density. Here, naming does not stabilise value; it mobilises it. The archive ceases to be a mausoleum of relevance and becomes instead a cartographic apparatus, continuously redrawing the borders of contemporary meaning.
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.