Founded in 2009 in Madrid’s Malasaña district by Anto Lloveras, the project unfolds across fifteen years, 180 series and more than 2,000 pieces, configuring what may be described as a living archive rather than a catalogue of works. Its founding gesture—the transformation of a modest room at Palma 15 into a weekly mutating “laboratory”—established a grammar of socioplastics: art as relational process, as distributed authorship, as situated ethics. This grammar resonates with Bourriaud’s relational aesthetics and Beuys’s social sculpture, yet departs from both by refusing the spectacular and privileging precarious materiality, ritual repetition, and affective economies. The early series (EXIT, BAZAR, KIWI, SOCIOPLASTICS) articulate a proto-institutional critique: the exhibition as event, the archive as breath, the artwork as a trace of encounter rather than a commodity. What is decisive is not the visual outcome but the relational residue. This first epoch consolidates a rhizomatic method grounded in seriality, scarcity, and immediacy, producing over 500 pieces in four years. The socioplastic logic inaugurated here situates LAPIEZA within a lineage of post-minimal, post-conceptual practices that treat form as contingent and meaning as co-authored. The archive becomes performative, metabolising bodies, texts, and gestures into a dense ecology of relations. This foundational matrix frames all subsequent phases, rendering LAPIEZA less a project than a long-duration epistemic experiment.
The expansive phase (2013–2019) marks a deterritorialisation of this laboratory into a nomadic dispositif, translating the room into a mobile ecology. Without a fixed venue, LAPIEZA becomes a body in transit, embedding itself within diverse geographies—Mexico, Oslo, Athens, Marseille, Bogotá—each generating a distinct “texture” of practice. Here, series such as PHANTOM, SWEET CORN BRUTALISM, THE WORD, and OIL & STONE articulate what might be termed geometries of affect: minimal, often fragile propositions that encode local atmospheres into symbolic form. Residencies function as modes of situated research rather than production residua; the installation listens, responds, and adapts. The archive thickens through more than 60 series and 500 pieces, while documentation evolves into a choreographic medium spanning text, performance, and editorial gestures. This phase refines the series as a narrative unit, an affective nucleus capable of absorbing linguistic, architectural, and social contingencies. Crucially, expansion here is not institutional ascent but hospitality as method: a network built through intimacy rather than visibility. The project’s relational economy resists market capture by privileging circulation over accumulation. LAPIEZA thus inhabits an ethics of mobility aligned with decolonial critiques of centre–periphery logics, proposing instead a mesh of horizontal exchanges. The nomadic turn consolidates the archive as an expanded choreography, where each displacement adds a new layer of epistemic sediment.
The RECREO phase (2020–2021) introduces a counter-temporality that reorients LAPIEZA toward slowness, vegetal rhythms, and landscape as co-author. Emerging from a rural retreat in Ávila, this period institutes what may be called a poetics of sedimentation. Pieces arise from walks, moss growth, minor gestures—almost invisible acts that nonetheless carry dense symbolic charge. Series such as RECRE0, BASAL, TRONCO, and THE ROAD TO RESTORATION articulate an ontology of care in which the archive ceases to be a repository and becomes respiration. Here, socioplastics mutates into ecological attentiveness: art as listening, as low-intensity ritual, as slow pedagogy. This temporal recalibration responds obliquely to global crisis, not through representation but through a radical contraction of scale and speed. Documentation acquires an organic tone; each piece registers presence rather than projection. The archive is no longer an index of productivity but a cartography of attention. This phase crystallises LAPIEZA’s epistemic pivot from relational aesthetics toward what might be termed relational ecology, where agency is distributed across human and non-human actors. The gesture becomes almost vegetal, rooting the project in a politics of duration. RECREO thus functions as an ethical hinge, preparing the project’s later engagements with institutions without relinquishing its slow core.
The biennial and ruralist phases (2022–2026) complete this arc by negotiating institutional visibility and territorial pedagogy. Participation in platforms such as Lagos Biennial and Contextile Guimarães reframes LAPIEZA as critical mediation: art as conduit between local ecologies and global circuits. Series like LIMINALITY, COPOS, and INVERNO DE PEDRA articulate thresholds between water, climate, memory, and symbolic form, redefining socioplastics as post-institutional language. Authorship dissolves into a mesh of collaborators, documents, and affects. With the relocation to Galicia in 2025, the project enters its ruralist phase, configuring an “affective archipelago” in which territory becomes archive and classroom. Minimal gestures—BANCAL, SAN ROQUE, NIGONHO—activate a transdisciplinary pedagogy grounded in listening and ritual. Here, LAPIEZA proposes a school of expanded art where landscape is epistemology and affect the critical tool. Across fifteen years and over 761,000 engagements, the project critiques the museum’s stability, offering instead an unstable archive that metabolises community, territory, and exchange into an operating system of care. LAPIEZA thus stands as a singular contribution to contemporary practice: an art of infrastructural ethics, where form is provisional, authorship distributed, and meaning continuously re-negotiated within a living mesh.
MORE RELATED READINGS
Milestone in Vienna https://antolloveras.blogspot.com/2026/01/1000-pieces-word-in-wien-2016-unstable.html Dive into the landmark of 1,000 pieces from Vienna (2016), weaving relational instability into LAPIEZA's vibrant living archive.
From Ruin to Memory https://antolloveras.blogspot.com/2026/01/minor-letter-e-from-industrial-ruin-to.html Uncover LAPIEZA 001e's transformation from industrial decay to socioplastic legacy, perfect for urban evolution enthusiasts.
Physics of Affection https://antolloveras.blogspot.com/2026/01/unstable-love-and-physics-of-affection.html Explore unstable love through relational installations, blending emotional physics with LAPIEZA's affective core.
Beyond Institutions https://antolloveras.blogspot.com/2026/01/relational-space-beyond-institution.html Discover LAPIEZA Madrid (2008–2012) as a defiant relational space, challenging institutional norms with foundational critique.
Rhizomatic Synthesis https://antolloveras.blogspot.com/2026/01/the-rhizomatic-vanguard-relational.html Delve into LAPIEZA's relational vanguard, synthesizing cultural ecologies in a conceptually rich framework.
Decolonial Ecologies https://antolloveras.blogspot.com/2026/01/the-rhizomatic-vanguard-of-relational.html Engage with LAPIEZA's rhizomatic sequences, fusing decolonial visions and temporal ecologies for profound insight.
Spatial Rituals https://antolloveras.blogspot.com/2026/01/recreo-ritual-as-spatial-score-and.html Immerse in RECREO's frontline rituals, linking slow ecology to LAPIEZA's reflective phases with spatial depth.
Stitching Resilience https://antolloveras.blogspot.com/2026/01/re-texhile-stitching-stories-of-waste.html Trace Re-(t)exHile's textile narratives of waste and endurance, echoing LAPIEZA's biennial explorations.
Ritual Ruralism https://antolloveras.blogspot.com/2026/01/ruralism-and-ritualistic-temporality.html Venture into Supernatural's ritual temporality, capturing LAPIEZA's eco-critical ruralist ethos with poetic allure.