Founded in 2009 by Anto Lloveras in Madrid’s Malasaña district, the project’s earliest phase, “The Room as Laboratory,” established a methodological grammar rooted in weekly mutation, seriality, and relational contingency. The Palma 15 studio functioned less as a production site than as a proto-institution, staging over 500 works as iterative propositions rather than resolved forms. Series such as EXIT or BAZAR articulated a proto-socioplastic logic, wherein symbolic exchange, affective economies, and precarious materiality displaced the authority of the singular artwork. This foundational moment already positioned LAPIEZA against the museum’s stabilising epistemology, favouring instead what might be termed an “unstable archive”: a living system of accreted gestures, provisional meanings, and collective inscriptions. In this sense, LAPIEZA resonates with Bourriaud’s relational aesthetics while exceeding it through a durational, infrastructural ambition that renders sociability not merely a theme but an operational substrate.
The Expansive Era (2013–2019) radicalised this logic by deterritorialising the studio into a nomadic research device. Here, LAPIEZA becomes an affective geometry: a shifting constellation of residences, encounters, and micro-institutions activated across Vienna, Mexico, Athens, Oslo, and Marseille. Reaching 1,000 works by Series 75 marks less a quantitative milestone than a threshold of epistemic saturation, where the archive itself becomes performative. Series such as PHANTOM and SWEET CORN BRUTALISM articulate a poetics of displacement, staging fragile alignments between bodies, texts, and provisional architectures.
RECREO (2020–2021) then introduces a counter-temporality, aligning LAPIEZA with slow practices and ecological attentiveness. Here, moss, mountains, and sedimented gestures become co-authors of the archive, reframing socioplastics as an ethics of care. The living archive breathes, recording not urgency but duration, not spectacle but attenuation. This phase foregrounds landscape as a corporeal agent and positions slowness as a critical medium against extractive cultural acceleration.
With the Biennials (2022–2024), LAPIEZA re-enters institutional circuits, yet without surrendering its decentralised ethos. Participation in the Lagos Biennial and Contextile Guimarães reframes art as critical mediation rather than representation. Series such as RE-(T)EXHILE and LIMINALITY negotiate thresholds between local agency and global visibility, embedding socioplastic practices within infrastructural politics. Rather than being absorbed by the biennial-industrial complex, LAPIEZA parasitises it, using institutional openings as conduits for redistributed authorship and decolonial imaginaries. The operational metadata—186 curatorial series, over 761,000 audience engagements—should not be read as managerial metrics but as symbolic indices of circulation and resonance. They function as a ledger of relational density, mapping how affective economies traverse platforms, geographies, and bodies. In this light, LAPIEZA performs what might be called a “mesh epistemology”: knowledge produced not through coherence but through entanglement.
The current Ruralist Stage (2025–2026) completes a conceptual arc from urban laboratory to territorial school. Here, LAPIEZA reconfigures itself as an affective archipelago, where minimal gestures and shared rituals generate a pedagogy of place. Series such as BANCAL and INVERNO DE PEDRA enact a post-human curriculum in which landscape becomes both classroom and co-archivist. This phase crystallises LAPIEZA’s most radical proposition: art as a socioplastic operating system, capable of reprogramming institutional time, authorship, and pedagogy.
By privileging listening over production and ritual over exhibition, LAPIEZA displaces the heroic artist in favour of distributed agency. Its mesh protocols formalise this shift, signalling a transition from artwork to infrastructural ethics. Ultimately, LAPIEZA stands as a durational critique of the museum form, proposing instead a living, unstable archive that metabolises territory, community, and symbolic exchange into a single socioplastic ecology.