LAPIEZA Art Series constitutes a long-duration experiment in rethinking art as an infrastructural and relational condition rather than a finite object or stylistic program. Founded in 2009 by Madrid-based architect, artist, and curator Anto Lloveras, LAPIEZA emerged within the context of post-relational aesthetics yet rapidly exceeded its discursive limits. From its earliest configuration as a mutable room in Madrid’s Malasaña district, the project proposed art as a continuously negotiated field of social exchange, collective authorship, and material contingency. Works were not stabilized for consumption but accumulated as temporal layers, forming what might be described as an “unstable archive” whose meaning derived from adjacency, repetition, and interference. This approach positioned LAPIEZA less as an exhibition space than as a proto-institution, one that displaced curatorial authority into a shared, procedural logic. Over fifteen years, the project has confirmed its methodological consistency through scale rather than repetition, reaching more than a thousand works and hundreds of thousands of viewers while maintaining a commitment to post-objectual ethics. Art here functions as a tool for symbolic redistribution, foregrounding process, care, and coexistence over visibility or market value. LAPIEZA’s significance lies precisely in this refusal of closure: it is an art series that does not culminate but metabolizes its own history, operating as a living system in which authorship, space, and time remain radically open.
Nomadic Epistemology
The historical evolution of LAPIEZA reveals a deliberate movement from spatial specificity toward epistemic and territorial complexity. After its initial laboratory phase (2009–2012), characterized by serial exhibitions such as EXIT and BAZAR, the project entered an expansive era in which mobility became both method and subject. Between 2013 and 2019, LAPIEZA deterritorialized into a nomadic structure, activating residencies and exhibitions across Europe and the Americas. This phase marked a saturation point in which accumulation itself became critical, exposing the fragility of authorship and the instability of cultural identity under conditions of displacement. Series such as PHANTOM or TAXIDERMY – THE CITY IS AN ANIMAL articulated cities as affective organisms, temporarily inhabited through provisional architectures and performative gestures. The subsequent ecological turn during the RECREO period (2020–2021) further radicalized this logic by introducing non-human agents—moss, landscapes, climatic rhythms—as co-authors of the archive. Time slowed, productivity dissolved, and attention shifted toward care and duration. More recent engagements with biennials and rural contexts signal not a return to institutional validation but a strategic infiltration, where LAPIEZA negotiates thresholds while preserving its distributed authorship. Across these phases, the project consistently reframes art as a mode of situated knowledge production, responsive to context yet resistant to territorial fixation.
Socioplastic Systems
Central to LAPIEZA’s theoretical coherence is its integration within the broader framework of Socioplastics, a concept that understands art as a malleable social structure composed of affects, materials, and symbolic exchanges. Within this paradigm, LAPIEZA operates as a core nervous system in a larger mesh of interconnected projects, archives, and future projections. The emphasis shifts from individual works to infrastructural conditions: rules of growth, modes of dissemination, and protocols of relation. Weekly mutations, serial logic, and post-numeric expansion produce a field in which meaning is generated through semionautic navigation rather than linear interpretation. This aligns LAPIEZA with post-humanist and new materialist thought, as well as decolonial critiques that question institutional centrality and epistemic extraction. Data, documentation, and digital traces are treated not as representations but as nutrients feeding a metabolic cultural organism. In this sense, LAPIEZA enacts an aesthetics of resistance grounded in collectivity and permeability, privileging process over permanence. Architecture plays a crucial role here, not as form but as relational scaffolding, enabling encounters, overlaps, and frictions. The socioplastic logic reprograms artistic value, proposing pedagogy, attention, and shared vulnerability as core currencies within contemporary cultural ecologies.
Futurity and Pedagogy
In its current ruralist stage, LAPIEZA consolidates its role as a pedagogical and speculative engine oriented toward futurity. Projects such as INVERNO DE PEDRA articulate a “territorial school” in which learning emerges from direct engagement with landscape, seasonality, and non-human agency. This marks a decisive shift from exhibition-making toward curriculum-making, where art becomes a method for rehearsing coexistence under post-digital and ecological conditions. The use of multimedia documentation, dispersed archives, and social platforms extends the project’s reach without re-centralizing authority, ensuring epistemic sovereignty through redundancy and dispersion. LAPIEZA thus operates simultaneously as archive, laboratory, and commons, offering a model for how contemporary art might function beyond spectacle and commodification. Its sustained commitment to collective process, infrastructural thinking, and ethical temporality positions it as a critical case study in transdisciplinary practice. Rather than proposing solutions, LAPIEZA prototypes conditions: for attention, for care, and for shared authorship in a fragmented world. As such, it stands not merely as an art series but as a long-term experiment in how cultural production can recalibrate its responsibilities toward social and ecological futures.
Lloveras, A. (2009–2026) LAPIEZA Art Series Archive. Available at: lapiezalapieza.blogspot.com