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.
Socioplastics is a transdisciplinary conceptual framework developed by Anto Lloveras, architect, artist, and researcher, to address the entangled relationships between space, identity, ecology, and social dynamics. Rather than a formal theory in the academic sense, socioplastics operates as a living methodology, aligning contemporary artistic practices with cultural and environmental ecologies. It emerged from a decade of situated experimentation—beginning with the founding of LAPIEZA in Madrid in 2009—and has since evolved into a synthetic protocol for ephemeral, relational, and context-responsive art-making. Rooted in influences as diverse as Joseph Beuys’ social sculpture, Nicolas Bourriaud’s relational aesthetics, and postcolonial spatial critique, socioplastics reorients the act of creation away from object-centric production and towards the cultivation of symbolic, affective, and social infrastructures. It is an art of process over permanence, of instability not as collapse but as creative ontology, and of networks not as data flows but as shared agencies of transformation. In this light, socioplastics becomes not only a curatorial strategy or aesthetic lineage but an epistemic toolset for navigating urban precarity, post-industrial landscapes, and fractured social imaginaries.
Key to the logic of socioplastics are several interwoven principles. First is shared agency and relationality: artworks are not static objects but open-ended processes that redistribute authorship and complicate aesthetic hierarchies. In this, it departs from relational aesthetics by incorporating decolonial sensitivity and environmental urgency, foregrounding how material context generates micro-ecologies of resistance and care. Second, instability is generative: spatial, emotional, and systemic fragility is not a deficit but a vector of potential, allowing for porous, reversible interventions that resist commodification. Third, cultural and environmental ecologies intersect in palimpsestic spaces where memory, decay, and regeneration intertwine. Socioplastics thus relies on situational minimalism, activating gestures—what Lloveras calls “fixers”—to summon collective memory and embodied attention. Finally, its methodology is inherently transdisciplinary: part fieldwork, part pedagogy, part curatorial strategy, it uses time as material, displacing form in favour of durational meaning. These principles are concretised in Lloveras’ work with students and collaborators through workshops, installations, and performative series, where the distinction between artistic, theoretical, and educational domains is dissolved.
The ten epistemic nodes or topolexias outlined on Lloveras’ blog in 2025 serve as a rhizomatic cartography of socioplastic practice. These interconnected zones span from urban intervention (TOPO-001) to performative film archives (TOPO-010), from radical pedagogy (TOPO-004) to ecological essays (TOPO-005). Together, they form a distributed knowledge system rather than a hierarchy of genres. For instance, shaded, walkable urbanism and porous architecture (001–002) express the spatial fragility that underpins social resilience. TOPO-003 and 004 demonstrate how environmental psychology merges with radical pedagogy, proposing classrooms as experimental ecologies. In TOPO-006 and 007, exhibitions and installations become performative essays, while TOPO-008 and 009 highlight repetition as method, generating meaning through serial activation and shared authorship. Films in TOPO-010 function as mobile, affective archives, animating rituals of the city and anchoring collective memory. These nodes are not categories but platforms of recurrence, where the same themes (fragility, ritual, relationality, agency) circulate, echo, and evolve. Through this, socioplastics becomes not just a practice but an infrastructure of thinking, a map one inhabits rather than observes.
Among the many emblematic works are the Yellow Bag Series, which transforms a ubiquitous plastic bag into a nomadic affective fixer, inviting reflection on memory, mobility, and waste. The MUDAS series (Mexico City, 2013) used oxidised banana leaves in social installations to evoke themes of transformation and mortality. The Light Social Sculpture in Provence (2014) reimagined Beuysian concepts through ephemeral rituals involving light and sound, while Re-(t)exHile (2026) documents the reanimation of second-hand clothing in African markets as material of exile and repair. LAPIEZA’s Cuerpos Filmados functions as a meta-archive, capturing years of socioplastic actions across cities, from flamenco rituals to critical urbanism, featuring thinkers like David Harvey and Jonas Mekas. Collaborations such as Doble Cara (2023, with Mateo Feijóo) blend architecture, objecthood, and image in a bicameral form. Each project embodies the central themes of socioplastics—fragility, relation, ecology, and distributed authorship—not through theoretical assertion, but through active, situated engagement. In short, socioplastics does not represent an art movement. It is an epistemic and infrastructural proposal for how to live, make, and think critically within unstable worlds.
SOCIOPLASTICS MESH MASTER INDEX 2026
001-MESH-FRAME: The Socioplastic Network as Epistemic Frame