El Dorado (2013), conceived in Madrid by Anto Lloveras, inaugurates the operative grammar of his Socioplastics by transmuting a negligible artefact—a 20-gram mylar emergency blanket—into a relational engine. Emerging after a six-month immersion in Mexico City, where the colonial phantasm of inexhaustible gold collided with quotidian precarity, the work enacts a decisive mythic inversion: gold ceases to signify extraction and becomes instead a fragile thermal membrane of shared survival. The sculpture possesses no pedestal, stable morphology, or proprietary aura; it exists solely through migratory gestures as the blanket passes from body to body—draped, carried, or wrapped—thus generating an invisible affective topology constituted by each handover. In this ultra-light dispositif, monumentality is annulled and commodification rendered void; material mass approaches zero while relational density intensifies. A concise case synthesis clarifies its stakes: in informal urban encounters, participants activate the blanket as a transient shelter, converting spectacle into mutual dependence and reframing value as care rather than accumulation. The work thereby radicalises the legacy of social sculpture into an unstable, portable, and metabolically sovereign practice that privileges maintenance over monument, circulation over possession. As precursor to later translatorial carriers—most notably the Blue Bags series—it anchors the HIPERVÍNCULOS platform as a mesh of executable bonds. Ultimately, El Dorado is not an object to behold but a durational event-machine, a golden skin that reveals the infrastructure of solidarity sustaining life in volatile urban ecologies.
Lloveras, A. (2013/2026) ‘EL DORADO – Socioplastic Sculpture (Madrid, 2013)’ and ‘The Relational Topology of EL DORADO’, available at: https://antolloveras.blogspot.com/2013/11/el-dorado-escultura-socioplastica-2013.html * https://antolloveras.blogspot.com/2026/02/el-dorado-lloveras-2013.html