LAPIEZA ART SERIES * From Socioplastic Rituals to Distributed Urban Pedagogies

 

LAPIEZA is an experimental contemporary art project founded in 2009 by Anto Lloveras and Esther Lorenzo in Madrid’s Malasaña district, where it originally operated as a physical space for unstable relational installations. More than a gallery or collective, LAPIEZA is best described as a relational art agency—a dynamic laboratory that assembles and reconfigures works from diverse artists into complementary constellations, always with a strong emphasis on socioplastic themes and social engagement. From its early gestural installations to its current status as a translocal platform, the project exemplifies a rhizomatic aesthetic rooted in relational ecologies, open authorship, and collective urban affect. Operating between art, architecture, and urbanism, LAPIEZA enacts a theory-in-practice where ephemeral materialities, experimental formats, and political responsiveness converge. Its trajectory—from a Malasaña storefront to a distributed network of performative actions—mirrors broader transformations in post-2008 art practices, where precarity, digitalisation, and collectivity become material and methodological imperatives. Crucially, LAPIEZA does not merely adapt to these conditions—it helps define their contours, offering a site-specific and transdisciplinary grammar for contemporary critical practice.

Socioplastics * From Ephemeral Urban Gestures to Post-Carbon Pedagogies

Its origins are intimately tied to the founding of LAPIEZA, a Madrid-based agency of relational art co-created with Esther Lorenzo, which introduced the idea of “active socioplastics” through numbered series and installations that resisted institutional hierarchies. LAPIEZA rapidly moved from its physical site in Malasaña into a distributed platform for critical practices, producing over 180 numbered series to date and catalysing collaborations from Mexico City to Trondheim. The 2015 exhibition Taxidermy: The City Is an Animal (5th Base Gallery, London) marks a foundational articulation of the term, positing the urban condition as wounded, sentient, and subject to symbolic rituals of incision, extraction, and preservation. From there, the framework expanded into a rhizomatic vanguard informed by Deleuzian topology, decolonial ecologies, and post-carbon aesthetics. By 2026, socioplastics enters a phase of transversal alignment—particularly with ideas like biospheric humanism, infrastructural affect, and transgenerational dialogue—manifest in projects like Trans Lighthouse and Icon and Commons. This evolution signals a shift from object-based critique toward situational world-making, where art is not representation, but method.