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.
LAPIEZA emerged in the wake of the 2008 economic crisis, as a direct response to the collapse of institutional legitimacy and the need for alternative artistic infrastructures. Founded by Lloveras—an architect, artist, and theorist of socioplastics—and Lorenzo, the initiative began as a relational installation of social proximity, activating informal networks and physical micro-interventions. Its initial works, such as the “relational batches” from 2009–2011, condensed three-dimensional installations into portable, distributable formats optimised for digital circulation, anticipating what would become an enduring interest in scalable art ecologies. From 2013 to 2015, LAPIEZA extended into international territories with projects like MUDAS in Mexico City and Taxidermy in London, exploring ritualised material transformation through plant matter, clothing, and public ritual. Between 2008 and 2018, the project reached a critical density with the Cuerpos Filmados meta-film archive, documenting socioplastic actions across cities, weaving together urban performance, embodied research, and distributed authorship. By 2026, LAPIEZA shifts again toward the Trans Lighthouse initiative, reorienting itself as a biospheric dialogue platform, addressing planetary urgencies such as urban instability, climate collapse, and post-human pedagogies. From storefront to network, from object to process, LAPIEZA’s evolution embodies a commitment to ephemeral politics, experimental formats, and art as infrastructure for coexistence.
At its conceptual core, LAPIEZA is anchored in socioplastics, a term coined by Lloveras to describe a transdisciplinary mode of art-making in which form is temporal, relation is matter, and instability is not a flaw but a resource. The project eschews the notion of the finished object, favouring instead sequential, porous, and reversible installations that generate meaning through symbolic collision and networked affect. Its relational methodology positions artists not as autonomous creators but as active nodes within a symbolic mesh, producing a social and material topography that is always in motion. LAPIEZA’s signature is not a style but a structure of participation: a grammar of shared authorship, distributed agency, and unstable spatialities. This structure operates on multiple planes: artistically, by fostering hybrid contemporary forms such as numbered series and collaborative objects; socially, by activating non-hierarchical interactions across geographies; relationally, by establishing affective vectors in the cultural landscape; medially, by maximising visibility through online dissemination; and politically, by proposing new imaginaries of life under conditions of instability. In its very reversibility and openness, LAPIEZA stages an aesthetic of provisional sovereignty, a light sculpture of potentialities rather than permanent declarations.
Key projects include Cuerpos Filmados, an open-ended digital archive documenting performances and social sculptures from 2008 to 2018, featuring contributions by thinkers such as David Harvey, Jonas Mekas, and figures from flamenco and urban theory. MUDAS, developed in Mexico City in 2013, used oxidised banana leaves and social rituals to explore ecological fragility and death. Light Social Sculpture (2014, Provence) translated relationality into luminous ritual forms, drawing from Joseph Beuys yet diverging toward a Latin-urban material vocabulary. Re-(t)exHile (2026) explores the transmutation of second-hand clothing from African markets into symbolic interfaces, activating textile exile and economic geology as media. Other works—such as Mini Instalación Post Botellón or Lapieza Fachada Cassiopea—deploy everyday urban objects and façades as unstable devices for critical engagement. Beyond individual projects, LAPIEZA also functions as a pedagogical protocol, with Lloveras integrating its logic into institutions such as NTNU (Norway) and UC3M (Madrid). The result is a living epistemology, in which artwork, teaching, research, and publication become indistinguishable. In this sense, LAPIEZA is not merely a project—it is a distributed system of socioplastic intensity, an evolving prototype for post-capitalist art practice grounded in instability, care, and emergent ethics.
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