SOCIOPLASTICS AT 11K — RESEARCH METHODS · KNOWLEDGE INFRASTRUCTURE · EXPERIMENTAL PRACTICE · CHANNEL: LAPIEZA-LAB · AUTHOR: Anto Lloveras · INSTITUTION: LAPIEZA-LAB · LOCATION: Madrid, Spain · YEAR: 2026 · FIELD: Research Methods / Knowledge Infrastructure / Experimental Practice



LAPIEZA-LAB grows from LAPIEZA, the independent relational art agency founded by Anto Lloveras in Madrid in 2009. Its curatorial and exhibition work developed a symbiotic language between the conceptual, the objectual and the relational; the resulting museography was named Socioplastics, joining the visible gallery situation, the exposed physical body, its networked memory and the links between the agents that compose it. A laboratory does not need to be a room filled with instruments. It can also be a persistent arrangement for producing, recording and comparing observations. Socioplastics has gradually become such an arrangement. Eleven thousand nodes, 110 Books and 11 Tomes now hold together experiments that began in different formats: urban walks, photographs, catalogues, diagrams, teaching exercises, applications, archives, bibliographies, conceptual operators and public posts. The laboratory quality of the corpus lies in repeatability with variation. The same question can be tested in another city, another medium or another institutional context without requiring the second situation to become identical to the first. Serial publication keeps the evidence visible; numbering gives every fragment an address; the Tomes and Books establish scale; the CamelTags provide a vocabulary capable of crossing formats. What emerges is not a single protocol but an infrastructure for comparing heterogeneous research acts. This also changes the status of documentation. Documentation is no longer the residue left after an experiment. It is part of the experimental apparatus. A post, a DOI, a photograph, a route, a metadata field or a marker can become the condition for a later comparison. The archive therefore remains productive rather than merely preservational. The laboratory now has explicit methodological outputs. Saberes Urbanos (2026) proposes a sequence of listening, observation, walking, marking, documentation and comparison that makes local knowledge traceable without flattening local differences. Subir Bajando (2026) examines the maintenance of the distributed research infrastructure itself. Relational Longitudinality (2026) shows how earlier curatorial and spatial records can be revisited without inventing a protocol for their past. These are proposals and analyses, not claims that every suggested intervention has been carried out. Their common material is the relationship between practice, evidence and the conditions under which someone else can reuse it. At 11K, LAPIEZA-LAB can read Socioplastics as one of its longest-running instruments: an open laboratory in which accumulation, recurrence and indexing are methodological operations. The map below fixes the current state of that instrument so that future work can continue to modify it without losing its history.