LAPIEZA emerged first, in 2009, as a physical gallery-hybrid in Madrid's Malasaña neighbourhood, co-founded with Esther Lorenzo. Its initial function was relational hosting: a space where artists could encounter one another, where works could be installed and experienced, where the social dynamics that socioplastics theorised could be tested in material conditions. The gallery format provided concentration, intensity, the friction of co-presence. But LAPIEZA was never only a gallery. Its programming—the numbered series, the unstable installations, the hybrid onsite-online formats—already contained the logic that would later explode the container, rendering the physical space unnecessary by distributing its functions across networked platforms. The numerical series documents what the work produced. The platforms reveal how the work organised itself to sustain that production across seventeen years. LAPIEZA, ARTNATIONS, FRESH MUSEUM, YOUTUBE BREAKFAST, URBANAS, the primary Socioplastics repository, the constellation of satellite blogs bearing distinct editorial identities—these are not successive iterations of a single idea but a differentiated platform ecology, each node assuming specific functions within a growing system that has accumulated rather than replaced.
The 2012 support from the Spanish Ministry of Cultural Affairs marks a threshold: institutional recognition arriving early enough to fund experimentation without capturing it. The grant enabled internationalisation, the incorporation of artists from Berlin, Lagos, Marseille, Mexico City, the transformation of LAPIEZA from Madrid node to global relay. Yet the project absorbed this expansion without changing its fundamental protocol: each new geography, each new collaborator, each new work was assigned a series number, absorbed into the cumulative archive, rendered continuous with what had come before. The platform grew by incorporating difference rather than standardising it. ARTNATIONS, emerging around 2017 as series 085 with one hundred works in range 1001-1100, represents a functional differentiation within the platform ecology. Where LAPIEZA emphasised the curatorial series as primary unit, ARTNATIONS extended the logic into mobile cycles, ritual formats, migratory patterns. Its name signals a scalar shift: from the neighbourhood gallery to the transnational network, from the series as exhibition to the series as distributed event. ARTNATIONS could occur simultaneously across multiple geographies, its works installed in Lagos and Marseille and Mexico City without requiring central coordination, its coherence maintained not by physical co-presence but by protocol adherence, by the simple fact that each component belonged to the same numbered series and therefore to the same mesh.
Fresh Museum, occupying series 063 with thirty works in range 801-830 in 2014, performs a different function: the curatorial laboratory, the space where experimental formats could be tested before potential integration into the larger series architecture. Its name carries deliberate ambiguity—fresh as new, fresh as impertinent, fresh as unprocessed by institutional preservation protocols. Fresh Museum operated as a threshold node, works appearing there that might later migrate into LAPIEZA or ARTNATIONS sequences, or might remain as singular experiments, their freshness preserved by non-assimilation.
YouTube Breakfast, initiated in 2007 as a VIDEO repository, addresses the digital substrate that underlies all contemporary practice. Its premise—treating YouTube's vast video archive as a rhizomatic classroom, a source of collective intelligence accessible to anyone with connection—enacted at the level of media theory what socioplastics was developing at the level of curatorial practice. The platform did not produce original video content but curated existing content through strategic selection, annotation, and serial organisation, demonstrating that authorship could operate through infrastructural intervention rather than material production.
The primary Socioplastics repository on Blogger, accumulating two million words across twenty thousand pages, functions as the systemic memory for this entire platform ecology. It houses the theoretical texts, the meta-reflections, the critical apparatus that the other platforms enact but do not articulate. It is where the project thinks about itself, where the protocols are formalised, where the lineage of influences is acknowledged and metabolised. The other platforms feed into this repository and draw from it, their activities generating documentation that enters the archive, their protocols derived from the theoretical work the archive contains.
The satellite blogs bearing distinct editorial identities—Ciudad Lista for urbanist discourse, El Tombolo for synthetic reflection, Otra Capa for layered analysis, Hola Verde Urbano for ecological urbanism—constitute a further functional differentiation. Each addresses a specific readership, a specific register, a specific region of the project's conceptual territory. They are not separate projects but interface nodes, surfaces through which different audiences can encounter the mesh without needing to navigate its full complexity. The scholar interested in urban theory finds Ciudad Lista; the artist exploring relational aesthetics finds El Tombolo; the student of ecological humanities finds Hola Verde Urbano. The same mesh, different entry points.
This platform ecology exhibits a developmental logic that distinguishes it from conventional artistic or academic careers. Growth occurs through differentiation and accumulation rather than succession and replacement. New platforms emerge to address new functions, new scales, new audiences, but existing platforms continue operating, continue accumulating, continue producing. LAPIEZA remains active seventeen years after its founding, its series numbering now past 186, its geographical reach expanded far beyond Malasaña but its operational logic intact. YouTube Breakfast continues its curatorial labour. The primary repository continues accumulating text. The system grows by adding nodes, not by substituting improved versions for obsolete ones.
This logic reflects the project's understanding of infrastructure. Infrastructure is not built once and maintained unchanged; it is layered over time, new strata added while old strata remain operative. The Blogger platform hosting the primary repository is the same infrastructure that hosted its first posts in 2009; the URLs remain valid, the content remains accessible, the citations remain functional. New platforms adopt new infrastructures—the satellite blogs use the same Blogger substrate but with distinct editorial configurations—while maintaining backward compatibility with the existing mesh through hyperlinked integration, through citational cross-reference, through shared tagging protocols.
The tags themselves constitute a navigational infrastructure within this platform ecology. The growth of this platform ecology maps onto the project's understanding of sovereignty. Sovereignty is not isolation but the capacity to determine the terms of relation. The platforms relate to one another on terms the project sets, through protocols the project maintains, using infrastructure the project has adapted to its purposes. They also relate outward to the broader media environment, to institutional circuits, to academic discourses, to artistic networks—but these relations occur through strategic interface, through controlled apertures, through channels the project can modulate rather than channels that determine its visibility.
The multiplication of platforms might appear, from outside, as dispersion, as loss of focus, as the project diluting itself across too many channels. The internal view reveals the opposite: concentration through distribution, each platform absorbing a specific region of the project's complexity, freeing the others to operate at different scales, in different registers, with different intensities. The primary repository can maintain theoretical density because it does not need to be accessible to urban practitioners; Ciudad Lista can address urban practitioners because it does not need to carry the full theoretical apparatus; YouTube Breakfast can experiment with pedagogical formats because it does not need to document every experiment in the series archive. The division of labour enables simultaneous operation at multiple intensities, the project as a whole achieving a bandwidth no single platform could sustain.
The shifts across this platform ecology index the project's responsiveness to changing conditions. The emergence of ARTNATIONS responds to the intensification of biennial culture, the migration of artistic production into transnational circuits, the need for formats that could operate across geographies without central coordination. The intensification of satellite blogs in the 2020s responds to the fragmentation of academic and artistic discourse, the proliferation of specialised readerships, the need for interfaces that could address different audiences without flattening content. The platform ecology adapts because its modular architecture permits adaptation, because adding a node is easier than reconfiguring a monolith.
The consistency across this shifting ecology is protocol adherence. Every platform, every node, every intervention operates according to the same underlying logic: the series as unit of accumulation, the tag as navigational coordinate, the hyperlink as connective tissue, the documentation as infrastructural component. A reader moving from a 2012 LAPIEZA exhibition to a 2026 essay encounters different content, different formats, different registers—but the same operational grammar, the same principles of organisation, the same commitment to persistence without institutional validation. The platforms differ; the protocols remain.
This combination of protocol consistency and platform variety constitutes the project's distinctive contribution to thinking about artistic and intellectual production in conditions of volatility. It demonstrates that a practice can maintain coherence without centralisation, can accumulate without standardising, can grow without diluting, can persist without institutional shelter. The platforms are not the project; they are its temporary stabilisations, the forms it assumes at different moments to address different functions. The project itself is the mesh that connects them, the protocols that govern them, the archive that remembers them, the persistence that outlasts them.
The platform ecology continues to grow. New nodes will emerge as conditions shift, as new functions become necessary, as new readerships require new interfaces. Existing nodes will continue operating, continue accumulating, continue serving their specialised purposes. The mesh will become denser, more differentiated, more capable of addressing complexity without simplifying it. And through all this growth, the underlying architecture will remain legible to those who know how to read it: a sovereign system that has built, node by node, platform by platform, series by series, the infrastructure for its own persistence.
Lloveras, A. (2026) Socioplastics: sovereign systems for unstable times. https://antolloveras.blogspot.com
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